ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT

The Secretary of State was asked-

Digital Radio Switchover

Nicholas Winterton: What his most recent assessment is of progress on digital radio switchover; and if he will make a statement.

Si�n Simon: The Digital Britain White Paper set out the Government's vision for the delivery of the digital radio upgrade by the end of 2015. We have committed to a review of the progress towards that timetable in spring 2010, and we have also asked Ofcom to review and publish progress against the upgrade criteria at least once a year, starting next year.

Nicholas Winterton: Is the Minister not aware that Digital Britain has in fact failed to address the inadequacies of digital radio broadcasting coverage? I am sure that he will agree with that comment. Representations made to me so far suggest that the idea of a switchover is currently very unpopular. Instead of rushing ahead with the switchover, will he take positive action to allow people to see some tangible benefits?

Si�n Simon: I am disappointed that the hon. Gentleman thinks that we are rushing ahead. We have said that we will move Britain to digital by 2015. That gives consumers and the industry six years to make the upgrade, which we are doing because we are committed to radio, we believe in radio and we love radio, and radio will not have a future unless it goes digital. We are not switching off FM, and we are putting new services on the FM spectrum that is vacated by the services which move to digital audio broadcasting, because we want to see radio prosper and grow in the digital age.

Barry Sheerman: Is my hon. Friend aware that switchover is affecting valued services on both radio and television? I have been lobbied by Teachers TV, which fears that it will lose an enormous part of its audience because the Department for Children, Schools and Families is stipulating that it must switch over totally to digital.

Si�n Simon: We are ensuring with radio switchover that community organisations and small community radio stations, which might currently be able to broadcast for only two weeks a year, will inherit the FM spectrum currently taken up by big regional and national FM broadcasters. Precisely such small, commercial, local community organisations will be able to flourish in the digital future in a way that they are technologically constrained from doing now.

Adam Price: The Minister is a Welsh speaker, so is he aware of the fears for the future of Radio Cymru, the BBC's Welsh language national service? It is not currently available on digital and will not be available in large swathes of western Wales for reasons of topography.

Si�n Simon: I have, with personal regret, to tell the hon. Gentleman that I am not really a Welsh speaker. [Hon. Members: Ah!] Dwi'n dysgu, 'de? I should have been a Welsh speaker.
	We are alive to the particular problems of Wales. There are serious problems with coverage, not just with respect to Radio Cymru but with digital coverage throughout Wales. We have made it clear that the nations and regions that are furthest behind in digital coverage will be the first priority for the most serious intervention, to ensure that they are not left behind when we move to digital. We have made it clear also that we will not move to digital unless 90 per cent. coverage at the very least is achieved.

Jeremy Hunt: I start by welcoming you to your post, Mr. Speaker-an elevation that was only marginally more likely than man walking on the moon, which happened 40 years ago today. I offer you my congratulations. I am sure that you will want to join me in offering the congratulations of the whole House to the England cricket team, which won an historic victory today-their first victory over the Australians at Lord's for 75 years. We would also like to congratulate the Minister on taking up his post in the DCMS team.
	The Government's own figures state that there are 65 million analogue radios in circulation, and they hope that the cost of digital radios will fall to £20 a set. That means that the cost of upgrading the nation's analogue radio stock will surpass £1 billion. Who will pay that £1 billion? Will it be the Government, or will it be consumers?

Si�n Simon: Mr. Speaker, I should apologise for having forgotten to congratulate you; I thought that we were taking your position for granted by now, but it is my first time speaking under your chairmanship. I offer my very sincere congratulations. I never thought that your elevation was unlikely.

Edward Vaizey: What about cricket?

Si�n Simon: The hon. Gentleman shouts cricket from a sedentary position. I can tell him that the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), was at the cricket, which almost certainly accounts for the first English victory at Lord's since, I believe, 1934.
	In response to what we might call the Tory sums of the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt)- [Interruption.] No, Tory sums. We do not know how many analogue radios are in circulation; it may be 65 million. The first point to make is that those sets will not become redundant. The FM spectrum will be well used for new services that are currently squeezed out. We are working with industry to come up with sets that are consistently priced at £20 or less. That will enable consumers to add to the 9 million digital sets-

Mr. Speaker: Order. May I gently say to the hon. Gentleman, who has been extremely generous in his remarks, that I do not want to have to press the switch-off button, but I am a bit alarmed that he has a second point in mind? It might be better if he kept it for the long winter evenings.

Jeremy Hunt: The point is that if people use their analogue sets, they will be able to listen to new radio stations, but not the radio stations that they have been listening to for a very long time. Was it not the height of irresponsibility to announce the phasing out of analogue spectrum without announcing any details or any funding for a help scheme, similar to the one that was in place for TV switchover? Will that not cause widespread concern among millions of radio listeners, who will feel that they are faced with the unenviable choice of either paying up or switching off?

Si�n Simon: I shall try to squeeze in my answer at the end of that extraordinarily long question. We will do exactly the same with radio as we did with television: we will carry out a full cost-benefit analysis of exactly what kind of help scheme might or might not be required, and we will proceed accordingly. There are 9 million digital sets in use already. Consumers have six years to decide how much they want to pay, for what equipment, to receive which services.

Free Theatre Initiative

Brian Iddon: How many tickets have been distributed through the free theatre initiative.

Ben Bradshaw: Nearly 50,000 free tickets have been issued during the scheme's first quarter, enabling thousands of young people to experience fantastic theatre who otherwise would not have done so.

Brian Iddon: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his new appointment, and I look forward to working with him. The Bolton Octagon theatre hopes to give away 4,000 tickets during the lifetime of the scheme. Will he congratulate it on the fact that by the end of the summer break it will have allocated a total of 718 tickets of its 790 ticket allocation, which I think is pretty good?

Ben Bradshaw: I regret that I will not be working with my hon. Friend for as long as I would like, as I think that he is standing down at the next election, which is very sad. I should certainly like to join him in congratulating the Bolton Octagon. Not only has it had remarkable success with the free ticket scheme, but it has had its most successful year ever in ticket sales. Of course, Sir Ian McKellen began his acting career in Bolton. If the free ticket scheme inspires another actor of his calibre, it will have been money very well spent.

Digital Radio Switchover

Ann Winterton: If he will continue to provide for analogue radio broadcasting beyond 2015.

Si�n Simon: The Digital Britain White Paper was clear that analogue radio, via FM, will continue beyond 2015. After the digital radio upgrade is completed, the vacated FM spectrum will be allocated to community radio stations and a new tier of ultra-local commercial radio.

Ann Winterton: I congratulate the Minister on his new position, not least because I am a former pupil of Erdington grammar school in his constituency. As he knows, 52 per cent. of listeners have not converted to digital audio broadcasting. Many groups of listeners, including the blind, are concerned that their analogue radios may be turned off in due course. That includes, of course, all those analogue radios in cars. What hope for the future can the Minister give those groups?

Si�n Simon: I am grateful for the hon. Lady's congratulations, and thank her for her adornment of my constituency. To answer her two questions quickly, on help for the blind, there is an important issue to do with audio description for radio stations along the spectrum. We have been working for 18 months-and continue to work-with manufacturers to make sure that sets that provide that description for the blind are made available at an affordable price in the digital future. On cars, we are working with the car industry to ensure that all new cars after 2013 contain digital radios. Technology already exists to convert FM receivers to digital in cars.

Ann Clwyd: Is it not a fact that the BBC would have more money to improve coverage and content if it spent less public money on excessive salaries and excessive expenses?

Si�n Simon: My right hon. Friend must take that up with Sir Michael Lyons and the BBC Trust. Sir Michael will perhaps be glad of the opportunity to take up those matters, because I am sure that he is conscious that he and the trust need to account to the public for them.

Tourism Industry

Adrian Sanders: What steps his Department is taking to support the tourism industry in the south-west.

Barbara Follett: Mr. Speaker, may I add my congratulations on your elevation? Having served with you on the marathon Minimum Wage Bill, I welcome your conversion to short contributions.
	Since April 2008, my Department aside from the marketing and economic development that it regularly contributes to Visit Britain and Visit England, has made eight separate grants worth over £4.2 million to the south-west region from its Sea Change programme, which supports cultural regeneration and the visitor economy. I am glad to say that the largest beneficiary of those grants was Torbay, which I can confirm was awarded £2.25 million in August 2008 for projects at Cockington Court and Berry Head.

Adrian Sanders: According to a recent parliamentary answer, the number of tourists in the south-west region fell by more than a quarter in the first quarter of this year, so why is that policy not working?

Barbara Follett: The number of tourists in the south-west region did fall in the first quarter of this year for a number of reasons including the credit crunch and the recession. I am glad to say, however, that initial figures show that it is now rising. We can see from benefit returns that the 10 towns with the most benefit claimants returning to work have been in seaside areas, and I am glad to say that six of them are in the south-west, where people are getting more work. The staycation and short breaks are providing a good result in the south-west.

Tobias Ellwood: One issue affecting the whole country, including the south-west, is the growth of the swine flu pandemic. Hon. Members might recall that, at the time of the foot and mouth outbreak and after the 9/11 attacks, the Treasury granted an additional £20 million, which was match-funded by the industry, to assist UK tourism through those difficult times. I notice that there is nothing on the DCMS or Visit Britain websites about swine flu. May I ask the Minister and, indeed, the Secretary of State what discussions they have had with the Treasury and the Department of Health to ensure that we avoid sensationalist headlines such as that in  The Daily Telegraph today-Crowds may be banned from major sporting events? What plans are there to help the British tourism industry to keep people informed and to tell them that Britain remains a safe place to visit?

Barbara Follett: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question, but I would caution him against such alarmist talk. I would also caution him against quoting the media, which are sometimes more interested in selling copies of their newspapers than in informing-

Tobias Ellwood: That is exactly the point that I was making.

Barbara Follett: The Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), sits on Cobra, the civil contingencies secretariat, and we are in daily contact. We are constantly updated on the situation. At present, the advice is to stay calm-I urge the hon. Gentleman to do that-not to panic and to take precautions.

Sport (Young People)

Tony Lloyd: What steps his Department is taking to encourage participation in sporting activity by young people who have left school.

Gerry Sutcliffe: Mr. Speaker, may I add my congratulations to you on your new role?
	Part of the legacy programme for 2012 will be to ensure that we leave behind a system that encourages those of all ages, particularly children and young people, to play sport. The five-hour offer for children aged five to 16 has been expanded to include three hours a week for those aged 16 to 19. To combat the drop-off on leaving school, and as part of more than £780 million of Government funding between 2008 and 2011, we are investing more than £15 million to create a new network of sports co-ordinators for those who have left school in order to move on to further education. Through our unprecedented investment in national governing bodies, nine sports will now also work specifically to reduce post-16 drop-off by 25 per cent. for 2013.

Tony Lloyd: Among other things, I would like to ask my hon. Friend whether in the context of the question it is better for people to sit on Cobra rather than drink Cobra.
	My hon. Friend knows as well as I do that there is an enormous drop-off in sports activity by young people post-school, particularly among young women. Will he work with local authorities and perhaps with private sporting clubs to ensure that his Department's marketing to encourage people into sport is taken up by those groups so that we can see our young people get back into meaningful activity?

Gerry Sutcliffe: It is a pleasure to sit on the Cobra committee, and I also enjoy a pint of Cobra now and again.
	My hon. Friend is quite right about the drop-off rate. In trying to get 2 million more people active in sport and physical activities by 2012-a key legacy aim-we are looking at the drop-off rate post-16. I know that in my hon. Friend's area of Manchester and in Salford the local authorities are doing a great deal of work with the local community, in initiatives such as StreetGames and the KICKz project, to encourage people to get involved in sport. I am particularly pleased with Sport Unlimited, which is aimed at 11 to 19-year-olds; that involves 900 young people and £36 million of investment. I hope that that will help to get them into more organised sport.

Mark Pritchard: The Minister will know that obesity is a huge and serious problem. If the Minister wants joined-up thinking and joined-up government with the Department of Health, why is his Department allowing the selling-off of four more sports fields and more school land than ever before, which of course prevents young people from having access to sports and addressing that important issue of obesity?

Gerry Sutcliffe: The hon. Gentleman usually gets his facts right, but he is completely wrong on this occasion. It is a complete myth that sports fields are being sold off. This Government have put processes in place to make sure that sports fields are not sold off. In fact, we have had a net increase in the number of sports fields. It is not just about sports fields; it is about indoor sports arenas and ensuring that we have world-class facilities for our youngsters and sports people. The hon. Gentleman is right about obesity, which is why the Government introduced free swimming, which more than 80 per cent. of local authorities took up. I am sorry that some Tory local authorities did not do so.

Ian Stewart: I have made all my falderals thanking and congratulating you, Mr. Speaker, so I will move straight to the Minister, who visited my constituency and saw the Hamilton-Davies trust and the Barton Athletic club projects in partnership with Salford city council. Does he agree that the project to encourage young people leaving school to take up non-traditional sports such as boxing, wrestling and martial arts is to be commended? Does he also agree that the 70 and 80-year-olds whom he saw training at Barton Athletic was a great example to others?

Gerry Sutcliffe: It was a great pleasure to visit my hon. Friend's constituency and to meet people at the Barton Athletic sports club. He is right that we saw young people getting involved in a range of different sports, but I was very happy to see a 70-year-old and an 80-year-old rowing and achieving fast times in preparation for entering the world senior games. As we are talking about older people, let me say that it was a great pleasure to see Tom Watson nearly become the British open champion yesterday. I congratulate the winner, but Mr. Watson's performance gave great hope to all those older golfers.

Don Foster: The Minister has rightly said that increases in sports participation are a critical part of the legacy plan for 2012, but does he acknowledge that after a good early start there has been stagnation? Does he accept that the latest figures show that in six out of nine key sports there has been no increase in participation in the past 12 months; that in three of those sports-rugby, football and athletics-there has been a significant fall in participation; and that fewer women and fewer people with limiting disabilities are participating in sport? The Government must do more. Will he acknowledge that there are good ideas out there, such as gift aid for junior membership of sports clubs and the Active Generation programme by the Prince's Trust? What are we to make of newspaper reports of some new scheme to be announced next year?

Gerry Sutcliffe: Let me say again that, although the hon. Gentleman normally gets his facts right, he has unfortunately got them wrong today. He keeps criticising the legacy that we are trying to create, but he will know that involving 2 million more people in sport and physical activity by 2012 has never been achieved by any other host of the Olympic games. There is a fantastic challenge ahead of us, but we are already making progress. As the hon. Gentleman will know, the new funding arrangements for Sport England are enabling the national governing bodies to increase participation: money is going to where sport is. More than £5 billion of lottery and Government funds has been invested since 1997.
	I hope that the Opposition will now stop carping. If good ideas are emerging, let us hear them.

Don Foster: I have just given the Minister some ideas.

Gerry Sutcliffe: The hon. Gentleman has given me one idea. I look forward to hearing more from him. The legacy will be great, and we will achieve our figures.

Bingo Industry

David Amess: What recent representations he has received on the future of the bingo industry; and if he will make a statement.

Gerry Sutcliffe: We have not received any recent representations on the future of the bingo industry, but I am aware that such representations are being made to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We recognise the important social role that bingo plays in many of our communities, and continue to engage with the industry on a range of issues affecting the state of the sector.

David Amess: Sadly, we have not got very far with the Treasury. Many of my constituents have contacted me to say that they are very worried about the future of Southend Mecca, and that they thoroughly enjoy playing the game. One hundred bingo halls have already closed over the past three years because of the 32 per cent. tax. Will the Minister have another word with the Treasury, in order to establish whether it can provide parity for the industry and lower the tax to the rightful level of 15 per cent.?

Gerry Sutcliffe: We continue to have frequent discussions with the Treasury, but the hon. Gentleman will know how much work the DCMS itself has done to support bingo. He will know, for instance, that in February we increased the permitted number of B3 machines in bingo halls from four to eight, and also examined stake and prize levels for category C and D machines.
	The hon. Gentleman is wrong about the number of bingo halls that have closed. In fact, between 37 and 40 have closed over the past 12 months, which represents 6 per cent. of the industry, but that is still too many clubs. We are aware of the important part that bingo plays in our communities, and we will continue to work with the industry and the Treasury to try to alleviate its problems.

David Drew: I hear what my hon. Friend says, but surely there is a need to lobby the Treasury to ensure that there is some consistency in the tax rates. If ever there was a need for a taskforce to work on saving one of our great British institutions, this is it. Would my hon. Friend consider leading such a taskforce?

Gerry Sutcliffe: I am always happy to be involved with a taskforce, but given my hon. Friend's reputation for becoming involved in key issues, he might want to chair this one. He will know that the Prime Minister has been involved in the discussions about bingo. He met a deputation from the Bingo Association, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley), to consider the issues in greater detail. We continue to work with the Treasury and others to ensure that we add to the work that we have already done to support bingo.

Simon Hughes: When I next speak to those at the very successful bingo club at the Elephant and Castle, or the very successful bingo club in Surrey Quays, will I be able to tell them that the Minister's Department will look again at the taxation of bingo, and lobby the Government, as soon as we know the court decision on participation valued added tax? That will give the Government another opportunity. The Department lost the last battle, but can the Minister assure us that it is determined to win the war?

Gerry Sutcliffe: The hon. Gentleman has made a good point. We await the outcome of the court case, but we continue to work with the Treasury. For example, we are discussing the current consultation on gross profits tax relating to gaming machines. As the sponsoring Department, we are working closely with the industry in the sector to try to ensure that its case is heard wherever necessary.

Digital Television Switchover

Russell Brown: What lessons learned from digital switchover in the Border TV region will be used in planning for switchover in other regions.

Ben Bradshaw: Switchover has been successfully completed in the Selkirk and Douglas transmitter group areas of the Border region, with the Caldbeck group area due to complete on Wednesday. A number of findings resulting from research carried out during the switchover have been used to refine switchover further for the next regions to switch.

Russell Brown: As my right hon. Friend has said, in two days switchover will be completed in the Border TV region. I sincerely hope that my good lady wife will ensure that everything is in order when that happens in my absence. I believe that the digital switchover help scheme initially caused concern. Has the uptake that we budgeted for been as great as my right hon. Friend expected?

Ben Bradshaw: It has not been as great as we expected; there is a considerable underspend. We do not think that, by and large, that is because the scheme is too complicated, but issues raised in my hon. Friend's area have been looked at, and the new advice and videos that are being provided are intended to make it less complicated. The main reason for the underspend is that most people have simply done it for themselves, perhaps helped by friends or family. The help scheme has been a great success, and has been valued by those who have used it. Nevertheless, there are always lessons to be learned, and we hope that we are learning them from the switchover in my hon. Friend's area.

Pub Industry

David Heathcoat-Amory: What recent representations he has received from the public house industry on the future of that industry; and if he will make a statement.

Gerry Sutcliffe: The Department has regular dialogue with representatives of the pub industry and other areas of the tourism and hospitality industry. That is essential to ensure that licensing policy reduces unnecessary burdens on small businesses while maintaining the necessary public protection.

David Heathcoat-Amory: That is all very interesting, but is the Minister aware that although responsible publicans-I am thinking particularly about such a group in the city of Wells-are doing what they can to counter irresponsible and antisocial drinking, when big retail chains sell loss-leading and discounted alcohol the pubs are blamed for the consequences? What is the Minister doing to counter that? What discussions has he had with the drinks trade to stop that particular unfairness, which is undermining responsible publicans?

Gerry Sutcliffe: The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point. He is right that responsible publicans ensure that they do not serve people who have had too much alcohol. Sometimes that causes problems outside their premises. We are working with the drinks industry. We responded to the all-party group on beer, members of which are present in the House today, in trying to look at the issues around pricing, and at a mandatory code to ensure that people do not have irresponsible promotions. Many such promotions are seen on the high street-for example, women can drink for free, or for £5 people can drink as much as they can. They are irresponsible promotions. Like him, I congratulate those publicans who act responsibly.

Lindsay Hoyle: My hon. Friend is aware that the pub is part of the community. It is an important part of that fabric, but has he thought about the number of pubs that are empty? Has he considered the challenge of alcohol-free pubs as an alternative for young people? They would be a way of controlling young people, and of giving them a new way of life and an outlet.

Gerry Sutcliffe: My hon. Friend raises a good idea that has already been acted on in a number of areas. Buildings are being taken over and alcohol-free pubs are in place. I do not want people to run away with the idea that we think that that is a substitute for good community pubs. We want to see good, strong community pubs, and with empty pubs that may be a good idea to develop.

Museums

James Duddridge: What assessment has been made of the effect of his Department's renaissance programme on regional museums in (a) England and (b) the east of England.

Barbara Follett: My Department has invested £242 million in the renaissance in the regions programme, which aims to raise standards and participation in museums across England. Since its inception in 2002, visitor numbers have increased by 18.5 per cent. In the east of England, visits by children aged 16 and under to hub museums have increased by 216 per cent. In addition 72 new jobs have been created in hub museums in the eastern region.

James Duddridge: I thank the Minister for that reply. Perhaps it shows my ignorance but I do not know what a hub museum is. The museums in Southend are very good, but residents and children in particular from Southend often travel to London to visit some of the larger museums. What more can be done through the renaissance programme to encourage visits to regional museums, particularly by people from the east of England and other regions that are quite close to central London?

Barbara Follett: I know that the Department's statutory body, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, has been working with Southend to increase its offer. I know that the council has many exciting projects, particularly concerning the Saxon King museum, and that a bid has been submitted for the Southend pier head project. As Minister for the East of England, I am obviously watching all those things closely and I am happy to help the hon. Gentleman with that work.

David Taylor: Snibston discovery park is a regional museum based on the former colliery of that name, sunk by the great George Stephenson. Would the Minister accept an invitation to come and look at the work that is done there? Creativity, energy and professionalism has enabled the museum to reinvent itself in the most impressive fashion. It is a successful museum for an area much wider than north-west Leicestershire. We could do worse than to have that as a beacon for the way ahead.

Barbara Follett: I would be delighted to accept my hon. Friend's invitation.

Edward Vaizey: As this is my first appearance under your watchful eye, Mr. Speaker, may I add to the legion of congratulations that have been sent your way and put on record my huge admiration for the job you are doing? [Hon. Members: More!] I still have three minutes, and I could go on.
	On Wednesday, the Minister will publish her independent review of renaissance in the regions, which she will describe as a real success. The report itself is, however, highly critical of the management of renaissance in the regions, including the criticisms of incomplete accounts, a lack of financial reporting and a lack of documentation. Is this why the report, which was given to the Minister at the beginning of March, is being published only at the end of July-the beginning of the summer recess?

Barbara Follett: The report is, in fact, being published in two days' time.  [Interruption.] Yes, but that is not the end of July. It is being published on 22 July, and until it comes out I shall not comment on it.

Broadcasting Bill

Derek Wyatt: What plans he has for pre-legislative scrutiny of the broadcasting Bill.

Ben Bradshaw: The digital economy Bill is not one of those in the draft programme proposed for pre-legislative scrutiny. Many of its proposals were contained in the interim Digital Britain document that we published in January. They have been the subject of reports by Select Committees in both Houses, and we are currently consulting on the proposals made in the final report last month.

Derek Wyatt: I thank the Secretary of State for that answer, and I welcome him to his new position. I am sorry that that Bill will not be in the pre-legislative programme, because if it were there would have been something for us to do in October and November before the Queen's Speech. May I take it as read, however, that it will definitely be in the Queen's Speech?

Ben Bradshaw: My hon. Friend will, of course, understand that we cannot at this stage say what will definitely be in the Queen's Speech-we cannot do so until Her Majesty stands up and delivers her Gracious Speech-but given that it is in the draft programme and it has been heralded by the Government as one of the mainstays of our active industrial strategy, I think he can be fairly confident that it has good prospects of being there.

Anne McIntosh: Given the possibility that such a Bill might be in the legislative programme, will the Secretary of State confirm that it will cover access to foreign language stations after the digital switchover for radio coverage?

Ben Bradshaw: I am afraid that I will have to write to the hon. Lady about that, if she will allow me.

Video Games

Keith Vaz: What recent discussions he has had with pan-European game information on the age classification of video games.

Si�n Simon: I have spoken to the Video Standards Council-the current UK agents for the PEGI system-about the classification of video games and have another meeting scheduled with it very soon. I have also had discussions with the British Board of Film Classification. Both organisations are working hard to ensure the success of the new system.

Keith Vaz: I thank the Minister for his answer and welcome the steps that the Government are taking on this issue. However, it is still a matter of concern that a game such as RapeLay, which shows extreme violence against women, can be downloaded from the internet. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that such games are not accessed from the internet, so that children and young people are properly protected?

Si�n Simon: We should be clear that the game was not classified, but was briefly available on Amazon and then was banned. The point that my right hon. Friend is making is about games that, like other brutal, unpleasant, illegal content, can be available on the internet. All steps that apply to any other content on the internet will apply to games. Specifically, as part of the Byron review we set up the UK Council for Child Internet Safety to work with content providers, internet service providers and all aspects of Government to make sure that such content cannot be accessed, particularly by children.

Mark Field: The Minister will know that Britain is a great leader in video and computer games, and while I take on board many of the concerns expressed by the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), will the Minister recognise that this is a global industry, not simply a European one, and in so far as we are going to have the safeguards to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, we will clearly also need to have global regulation along those lines?

Si�n Simon: The system of regulation for which we have opted-the PEGI system-is pan-European, and as such, we see it as the building block to moving towards a global regulatory future. The key principle is that the markings on games should make it clear to parents which games are suitable for adults and which are suitable and unsuitable for children and young children. Adults should be allowed to access adult content; children most certainly should not.
	Topical Questions

Sandra Gidley: If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Ben Bradshaw: We are responsible for a number of important areas. We are announcing excellent results for our free swimming and free theatre tickets initiatives this week. I wish to add to the earlier congratulations to Andrew Strauss and his team on their superb result at Lord's. In doing so, we should not forget the achievement of our women's cricket team, who have won every international competition this year. We believe that they have made themselves the most successful English sporting team in a single year in history.

Sandra Gidley: The Secretary of State makes a good point about the influence of sport, but does he think it is right that sporting events should advertise alcohol? Does he not think it is time to bring an end to that?

Ben Bradshaw: The hon. Lady will know that we are considering that at the moment. There will always be a balance to be struck between the sort of messages that advertising sends out about healthy living and its health impact-those issues will concern people a great deal-and the importance of sporting events and sport generally being properly funded. That applies to many of the funds that go to sports at grass-roots level.

Hugh Bayley: Local newspapers make politicians and public officials more accountable, but sadly, many titles have ceased printing because of a fall in advertising revenue and a migration of advertising to the internet. On 20 January, in Westminster Hall, I proposed cross-subsidising local papers with the internet revenue. In its early days Channel 4 was cross-subsidised with ITV advertising revenue, without that undermining Channel 4's editorial freedom. Will my right hon. Friend examine the possibility of applying the same principle to local newspapers being cross-subsidised by internet advertising revenue?

Ben Bradshaw: rose-

Mr. Speaker: Order. Before the Secretary of State replies, may I say to the House that there is a tendency now for topical questions to be more like discursive essays? What we are seeking is a pithy question and a pithy answer.

Ben Bradshaw: I certainly share my hon. Friend's concern about the fate of local newspapers, as I believe we all do in this House. Those papers are the lifeblood of our local democracy, they hold local authorities and other bodies to account and they are a very important part of our democracy. If he has studied the recommendations in our Digital Britain White Paper, he will have seen a number of proposals that will help, including the establishment of independent news consortiums to help provide local and regional news. Such an approach could include ownership or part-ownership by existing or new newspaper organisations. We are examining a number of areas in order to help local newspapers, because we agree that they are vital.

Anthony Steen: Does the Secretary of State agree that if the entire population of Exeter were kidnapped, that would make a huge news story, yet approximately the same number of people are trafficked every year in and around Europe, be it for debt bondage or as sex slaves? Will he put his name to a suggestion that the media launch a new initiative-a new crusade-to draw attention to this worldwide evil?

Ben Bradshaw: I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for saying that it is not my job to tell media organisations what they should investigate and what they should do. However, may I pay tribute to the excellent work that he has done in this House to highlight the problem of human trafficking? I am very sorry that he will not be here in the future to continue doing that. Perhaps now that he, sadly, has more time on his hands, he will be able to spend some of it persuading media organisations to do exactly what he has just advocated.

Andrew MacKinlay: I want to ask the Minister what the news is following my intervention last Thursday with the education and skills people about the co-location of the Royal Opera House and National Skills Academy for Creative and Cultural Skills project in Thurrock. She will have noticed that I accused the Government of not being involved in joined-up government and of being confused and dysfunctional. To ask a pithy question: can we have the money to get this site under way this summer-yes or no?

Barbara Follett: To give a pithy answer, I am doing my utmost to get my hon. Friend the money. I am nagging, pushing and writing to the relevant Minister. I am doing everything I can to get the money, because I, too, have an interest in this.

Peter Bone: In 1934 there was a Labour Government in deep trouble in the midst of an economic recession. The only bright spot that year was the England cricket team beating the Australians at Lord's. The following year, Labour was turfed out and a Conservative Government were elected, who led the country out of recession. Does the Minister agree that it is great news that history is repeating itself?

Gerry Sutcliffe: It is great news that the England cricket team won a test match at Lord's against Australia for the first time since 1934, and it is also great that the England women's cricket team have won everything in their path. Another thing that has happened that has never happened before is the biggest investment there has ever been in sport, made by this Government. I hope that we will have more success, built on the success that we had at the Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing last year-and the hon. Gentleman should not count his chickens.

Jessica Morden: With Cardiff's successful hosting of the Ashes and the Ryder cup coming to Newport next year, does the Minister agree that we should take full advantage of the growing levels of expertise in Wales in hosting major sporting events, so that we can have more in the future?

Gerry Sutcliffe: My hon. Friend is right. Not only did we have a successful test match in Glamorgan, but the school games will take place later this year, and the Ryder cup will be in Wales next year. In Wales, and all over the UK, expertise is being built up in sporting events, and I congratulate all involved in Wales on hosting some tremendous events.

Ann Winterton: The British amusement industry believes that the Government should abandon their proposed gross profits tax as a further unnecessary administrative burden, and instead work with the industry to deliver efficiencies to benefit both Government and business. Will the Minister work with the industry to benefit not just the industry but the Treasury and the public, not least in the seaside arcade sector?

Gerry Sutcliffe: We have supported the seaside arcades. As the hon. Lady will know, we had a review of the category C and D machines and we have also considered category B. The gross profits tax is part of the overall issue, but we will continue to talk to the Treasury. We work with the industry on a regular basis and we have alleviated many of the problems of seaside arcades, although there is a lot more to be done.

Clive Efford: Does my hon. Friend agree that on a day when we have won the first Ashes test match at Lord's since 1934, it is a shame that it was shown only on a fee-paying channel, not a terrestrial channel where more people would have seen it and perhaps been encouraged to participate in the sport in the future?

Gerry Sutcliffe: That is why the Government have instituted a review, chaired by David Davies. We hope that his panel will respond by September. I agree with my hon. Friend that it is sad when people can only see edited highlights on Channel 5, and sometimes not even those. We have to strike a balance between money going into the game and the opportunity for a wider audience to see such significant events.

Evan Harris: Is the Secretary of State aware of concerns in the creative industries that the way in which English libel laws operate, or at least London's reputation as the libel capital of the world, is suppressing freedom of expression and creative freedom? Will he agree to meet a cross-party delegation with leading members from the creative industries in the next few months to discuss their concerns?

Ben Bradshaw: I am sure that my hon. Friend or I would be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and a delegation, but he will be aware that this is primarily a matter for the Ministry of Justice. We are certainly aware of the concerns that he expresses: I understand that they will all be covered in a forthcoming consultation document that the Secretary of State for Justice will launch in the near future.

Graham Allen: Can anybody on the Front Bench explain why the Government abolished the regional sports boards?

Gerry Sutcliffe: Yes: it was a decision to try to cut the bureaucracy within Sport England and to put the money directly into sports governing bodies, which we have done. We are working with county sports partnerships and local government. The regional sports bodies did well, but were not operating effectively and efficiently enough. That is why we made the change.

David Evennett: My constituents are very concerned about the very high salaries paid to some at the BBC. Does the Secretary of State share those concerns?

Ben Bradshaw: Those must be a matter for the BBC. It has plenty of senior managers who are well paid enough to make such decisions and account for them, without it being necessary for me to micro-manage salary levels for staff. I have always made it clear, including to the BBC, that we live in an age of transparency and accountability. We in this place have been through a painful process of moving towards that, which I welcome. In the long run it will do this place a great deal of good. I am not aware of any institution or organisation that has not benefited by being more open.

Jim Devine: Ronaldo sold for £80 million, Manchester City effectively owned by a country and offering John Terry wages of £250,000 a week, and an English manager saying that every player in Scotland is available at a price: is it not time we had an investigation into the running and funding of British football?

Gerry Sutcliffe: My hon. Friend will know that is exactly why we wrote to the premier league, the Football League and the Football Association with a number of questions about the sustainability of football, together with issues around home-grown players. It is right for the Government to express the concern of ordinary fans and our communities about what is happening in football. The premier league is the best in the world and we want it to remain so, but we need transparency and sustainability. I shall be writing to the football authorities in the next few weeks to try to help move this thing forward, because there is great concern about the sustainability and viability of many football clubs.

Andrew MacKay: Following the earlier unsatisfactory exchange, will the Secretary of State now assure the House that the Government are taking the threat of swine flu to the British tourism industry this year seriously? Will he tell us what representations he has been making to the industry?

Ben Bradshaw: Those conversations go on all the time. I urge Opposition Front Benchers not immediately to see parallels with foot and mouth, which involved a completely different set of circumstances. At the time, mistakes were made; too much of the countryside was closed down for the wrong reasons-partly because we were under pressure from the agricultural industry not to let people walk over land. In all the reviews of foot and mouth it has been acknowledged that that was a mistake At this stage, there is no suggestion that the swine flu epidemic need impact at all on tourism or on the sort of gatherings that my Department sponsors-sporting or cultural, or festivals. I was at two festivals over the weekend-[Hon. Members: Which ones?] Latitude and the wonderful Tolpuddle Martyrs festival. People should carry on leading their lives as normal.

OLYMPICS

The Minister for the Olympics was asked-

Budget

Ann Winterton: What recent changes have been made to the overall budget for the London 2012 Olympics.

Tessa Jowell: The £9.325 billion funding package that I announced to the House in March 2007 remains the budget for the Olympics. The project remains on budget and on time, and as part of my commitment to budget transparency, I have since May 2009 been publishing updates on a quarterly basis. The latest quarterly update was published earlier today.

Ann Winterton: Bearing in mind the United Kingdom's present economic difficulties, is the Minister confident that sufficient funds will be forthcoming from the private sector for the 2012 games, and that the contingency fund will prove sufficient to fill the potential funding gap?

Tessa Jowell: Yes, I am. That is an important question, so it is worth placing it on record that 65 per cent. of the contingency remains unspent. We are confident that it is sufficient to complete construction and the other commitments made in the budget. In relation to the hon. Lady's questions about the private sector, she will know-because I have reported to the House-that contingency funding was used to make good the shortfall in private sector contributions both to the press and broadcast centre and to investment in the Olympic village-an investment that will yield about 2,800 homes. The private sector contribution to the staging cost of the games through the organising committee remains well on target, at more than £500 million.

Janet Anderson: May I add my congratulations to you on your election, Mr. Speaker? I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to take particular note of a gifted young tenor who sings Jerusalem at the Ashes. His name is Sean Ruane and he comes from Rossendale in my constituency. May I also urge my right hon. Friend to give serious consideration to whether he might have a musical role in the 2012 Olympics?

Tessa Jowell: I thank my hon. Friend. I am sure that Sean's talents, now recorded in  Hansard, will go from strength to strength. I draw her attention to the consultation that is taking place around the country about the content of the opening ceremony, which I hope will be many things, but in no small part a showcase for great young British talent.

Tom Brake: What recent changes have been made to the budget to support the ambitious new programme that, according to  The Independent on Sunday, the Government are apparently launching to support grass-roots sport? How much sooner does the Minister think the Government will reach the target of getting 1 million more people into sport as a result of the campaign?

Tessa Jowell: The budget to which I have just referred is almost entirely for construction, security and non-sport, non-participation activity. The costs to which the hon. Gentleman referred are being met in a variety of ways: the investment in school sport, community sports clubs and the reconstruction of facilities, and the £100 million a year that the Big Lottery Fund is spending on sport. That all means that whereas in 1997, when this Government came to power, Exchequer investment in sport was £50 million, that figure is now £400 million, so the campaign to get 1 million more people taking part in sport on top of the participation by young people at school is being funded by a steady increase in investment.

Several hon. Members: rose -

Mr. Speaker: Order. I would like to get through a few more questions and answers, and if we show some self-discipline, we will do just that.

Clive Efford: Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way in which we will measure the success of the Olympics is by participation in sport beyond 2012? Does she recognise the important and value-for-money role that can be played by non-for-profit voluntary organisations in delivering that and encouraging participation in sport as we approach the Olympics?

Tessa Jowell: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and frequently makes that point. The thousands of sports clubs throughout the country are the backbone of participation, and their contribution will enable us to achieve the target of getting 1 million more people active in sport.

Hugh Robertson: A key element in containing the overall budget is the use of the stadium in legacy mode. I think that everybody would agree that Manchester showed the way after the Commonwealth games. In her initial public pronouncements Baroness Ford, the new chairman of the legacy company, has indicated her desire to re-examine the issue of a football use, and both the Rugby Football Union and the Rugby Football League are keen to use the stadium to support their bids. Given that the last four European cup finals have been played in dual-use stadiums, is the right hon. Lady prepared to re-examine her opposition to such a move?

Tessa Jowell: The hon. Gentleman knows that I have discussed this with Baroness Ford. We have not yet won the right to host the World cup in 2018. Clearly, if our excellent bid is successful, there will of course be a case for re-examination, but this is not cost-free, and the House should understand that plans will proceed to make sure that we honour our commitment to the International Olympic Committee and to athletes across the country in the bid book, that we will have, as a legacy for the games, a 20,000-seater, grand prix-capable athletics stadium. We are making good progress in building the legacy. Tenants include a school, the English Institute of Sport and the National Skills Academy. Baroness Ford is eager to squeeze every last benefit of legacy from every single venue, and I support her in that, but I want certainty and planning for the legacy of the stadium.

Costs

Nicholas Winterton: What her most recent estimate is of the cost of staging the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games.

Tessa Jowell: I shall answer speedily, Mr. Speaker. The cost of staging the games will primarily be met from the £2 billion budget of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, which was raised principally from the private sector. The costs of additional wider security and policing, and a £66 million public sector contribution towards the Paralympic games, are contained in the £9.3 billion public sector funding package.
	As would be expected with a major national event of this kind, there will also be other attributable costs to the public purse, and they will be funded from within departmental expenditure limits.

Nicholas Winterton: Sport transcends politics. Every party in the House wants the 2012 Olympic games to be an outstanding success for the benefit of our great country. Can the Minister give any further details about which operations may be scaled back if there is a shortfall in sponsorship and revenue from the private sector? That is important: we want a success, but we also want the facts.

Tessa Jowell: The hon. Gentleman is right that the Olympic games are being planned and delivered on a cross-party basis as far as humanly possible. The second point, however, is that as the development of the park has proceeded, decisions have been taken to put in further public sector investment where private sector financing has not been forthcoming. In staging the event, the organising committee will take full account of the likelihood of meeting its budget, which it expects to do. It is also worth the House recording that the committee is already substantially ahead of its private sponsorship-raising activities, so we have cause for confidence on that point.

Paralympic Games

David Borrow: What steps she is taking to ensure the success of the London 2012 Paralympics.

Tessa Jowell: We are determined to ensure that there is full equivalence between the Paralympics and the summer games and that the Paralympics are fully integrated into the organising committee's plans, with a cross-Government Paralympic legacy plan, which will identify how we are going to use the power of the Paralympics to increase opportunities for disabled people more widely.

David Borrow: A couple of weeks ago I attended a leavers assembly at Ashbridge school in my constituency, at which a presentation was made by Shelly Woods from Blackpool. Shelly won a silver medal and a bronze medal at the Beijing Paralympics and made a truly inspirational presentation. What opportunities will exist to celebrate the Paralympics, as well as the Olympics, in the forthcoming open weekend?

Tessa Jowell: I thank my hon. Friend and join him in congratulating Shelly on her contribution. The forthcoming open weekend, which will mark three years to go until the opening of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games, will be marked across the country. Some 750 events are already registered, and I encourage hon. Members from all parts of the House to take part. In the north-west, my hon. Friend can go to one of many events, which include the academy cup at Greenbank sports academy and many others besides. The open weekend will be a great moment to celebrate achievements so far, and Olympic and Paralympic sports will both feature.

Michael Penning: This weekend a great Olympian became the world boxing champion. Amir Khan is a great role model for young people in this country, yet small boxing clubs where people like him will come from in future are struggling. I wonder whether the Minister or the sports Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), would like to visit a new boxing club in my constituency and see not only the great young people coming forward, but the financial problems that they face.

Tessa Jowell: I am sure that the House will want to congratulate Amir Khan. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about his dedication to providing leadership to young men-and, indeed, young women-right across the country as they take up boxing. As my hon. Friend the sports Minister has pointed out, investment is going into boxing clubs because of Amir Khan's advocacy and the evident benefits to young people.

Gregory Campbell: What progress is being made on the recruitment of thousands of volunteers from right across the United Kingdom to ensure that the Paralympics and the Olympics in 2012 are the outstanding success that we all want them to be?

Tessa Jowell: The plans for volunteer recruitment will be announced next year and recruitment will start shortly thereafter. However, the scale of public enthusiasm for the forthcoming Olympics can be measured by the fact that although some 70,000 volunteers will be recruited by the organising committee, more than 250,000 people have already registered their interest. We in Government are absolutely determined to ensure that all volunteers who offer themselves for the games have an opportunity to get involved in their community in one way or another.

Swine Flu Update

Andy Burnham: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the AH1Nl swine flu pandemic. I wish to do three things today: to update the House on the spread of the virus, to provide additional details about the launch of the national pandemic flu service, and to set out how Members in all parts of the House will be kept informed during the summer recess.
	In recent weeks, we have discovered a great deal more about the swine flu virus. While it has spread quickly, the virus has not become more dangerous. For the vast majority, swine flu remains a mild and self-limiting illness-and let me be clear: our advice to the public about dealing with it has not changed. However, as the number of cases rises, it is understandable that people are becoming more concerned, and all organisations have a role to play in providing reassuring, consistent and clear advice.
	First, I wish to deal directly with advice to pregnant women, which, again, has not changed since the outbreak began. The chief medical officer says that most pregnant women with swine flu will get only mild symptoms, but pregnancy brings a higher risk of complications. Bearing these risks in mind, at present mothers-to-be are advised to continue normal activities such as going to work, travelling on public transport, and attending events and family gatherings. However, they are advised to take the following steps to reduce their risk of infection and complications: first, to observe good hand hygiene, with frequent use of soap and water; secondly, wherever possible, to avoid contact with someone who is known or suspected to have swine flu; and thirdly, if they have flu-like symptoms, to make early contact with a general practitioner, who may advise treatment with antiviral drugs. If in doubt, pregnant women should seek advice, and if they think they have symptoms, they need to contact their GP as soon as possible for antiviral treatment. The chief medical officer will be reissuing this advice later today.
	I also understand that families with small children have concerns. The key characteristic of swine flu is fever. The first thing that parents should do is check whether their child has a temperature at or over 38° C. They should then contact the national pandemic flu service, once it has launched, or their GP, if their child has a high temperature and any one of the following symptoms: tiredness, headache, sore throat, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, vomiting and diarrhoea, aching muscles, or limb and joint pain.
	Since my last statement to the House, the daily reported figures from the Health Protection Agency have been replaced by weekly estimates based on the numbers reporting flu-like illness to their GPs. The latest figures published on Thursday show how the number of cases has grown, with 55,000 new cases of swine flu reported last week alone. There were 652 people in hospital, 53 of whom were in critical care. There had been 26 deaths in England.
	The figures also confirm that the virus has now taken hold around the country, rather than in isolated pockets, and show how quickly this has happened. On 8 July, just six primary care trusts reported exceptional levels of flu-like illness. By 15 July, this had increased to 110 PCTs-hence our immediate decision last week to activate the national pandemic flu service. The latest figures show that nine out of 10 NHS regions are now showing exceptional levels of flu-like illness, based on GP consultations.
	GPs are on the front line in this pandemic. They are coping admirably with the increased work load, and I am sure that the House will want to extend its thanks to them, to their staff and to everybody working so hard throughout the health service, the Health Protection Agency and the Department of Health. All professionals deserve our full support, and the best way to do this is to find new ways to relieve pressure on the front line.
	The technology to launch the national pandemic flu service has been available for some time, but given the latest HPA figures, and drawing on advice from the field, we have now reached a point where the service is required. I can therefore confirm that the service will go live in England by the end of this week, subject to testing. It will be accompanied by a major public information campaign. After the launch, people will no longer need to ring their GP: they can either answer questions online via the new website or ring the call centre service, where trained staff will be able to assess them over the phone. If swine flu is confirmed, they will then get an authorisation number, which their flu friend can use to pick up antivirals from local antiviral collection points. I will ensure that all Members receive information on the location and number of collection points in their area before the launch of the service later this week.
	In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the situation is different. We have not seen the same rate of spread, and, as a result, the service will not be in operation in those countries this week, but they may choose to opt in at a later date. People in those regions should, therefore, continue checking their symptoms on the NHS website, or via the swine flu information line, and then call their GP for diagnosis over the phone.
	The Government must be as open as possible about the potential scale of the threat, so that organisations in the public and private sectors can plan effectively. Last week's planning assumptions set out reasonable worst case scenarios for them to plan against. We published a range of figures covering the numbers who could get swine flu; experience complications, and be hospitalised or die. The assumptions also cover the number who could be absent from work because they or their family get swine flu.
	Let me stress again that those are worst case scenarios, not predictions-and we need the media to play their part in reporting them as such. For the NHS, the assumptions mean that it can now step up its preparations to cope with a sudden surge in swine flu cases, and it already has detailed plans in place. Similarly, infrastructure providers and other essential operators, such as food suppliers and electricity, gas and water companies, already have continuity plans to maintain services. However, organisations of all kinds should now establish plans to reduce the threat that swine flu poses to the economy.
	The Government have published guidance documents on continuity planning, and we have also set up a new business advisory network for flu to provide a single source of information and advice. Full details are available on the business link website-www.businesslink.gov.uk.
	Let me now update the House on vaccines. The Department of Health has already signed contracts with two manufacturers to supply enough vaccine for the whole population. According to their delivery schedules, we should begin receiving supplies from August, with enough becoming available for at least 30 million people by the end of the year. Clearly, we want the vaccine to be available as soon as possible, but we cannot compromise on safety. We will take all necessary steps to ensure that the vaccine is appropriately tested.
	We are also now planning the vaccination programme so that we can start administering vaccines to priority groups, including NHS and social care staff, as soon as we get the green light to proceed. We will continue to take the best independent scientific advice on all questions about vaccination.
	Finally, I recognise that hon. Members must be updated during the parliamentary recess. I have therefore asked strategic health authorities to provide weekly briefings for MPs coinciding with the HPA's national updates. They will cover local information on the number of diagnosed and confirmed cases and hospitalisations, as well as updates on antiviral collection points, local information on any clusters or other specific developments, and a hotline number for hon. Members to use to contact their local strategic health authority.
	In addition, the civil contingencies committee will meet weekly, and Ministers and officials will be in close contact throughout the summer months to respond to emerging issues. This evening, there will be a briefing session open to all Members with the chief medical officer.
	I am also grateful to the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) and for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) for the constructive conversations that we have had. I will of course keep Conservative and Liberal Democrat Front Benchers updated over the summer, and we will continue regular discussions with Health Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to ensure a consistent UK-wide response.
	In conclusion, concern has risen and there is increasing pressure on services, but there is no change to the advice or to Government plans. It is because we have planned carefully for this eventuality that we have large quantities of antivirals, a national pandemic flu service about to launch, and a vaccine on the way. That constitutes a solid base on which to deal with future challenges. I commend the statement to the House.

Andrew Lansley: The House will be grateful to the Secretary of State for his further update on the flu pandemic response. I am sure that hon. Members also wish to offer our condolences to the families of those who have died as a result of contracting the H1N1 virus. Again, I join the Secretary of State in expressing our gratitude to all the NHS staff, particularly in primary care, for their response to the growing pressures arising from the virus.
	The House will know that we supported the containment strategy and the shift to a treatment-only policy. In time, it will be important to understand how effective the containment strategy was in practice. There is some evidence to suggest that a significant number of people who might have been given antiviral treatment while the containment strategy was being pursued, or given prophylactic access to antiviral drugs, did not in fact receive it. Will the Secretary of State agree to a review of that in due course, although obviously not at this stage?
	It is clear that there is still a considerable degree of confusion about what people should and should not do about this flu. Publishing planning assumptions and preparing for the worst is one thing, but we really do need the Government more effectively to explain that, up to now, we are not experiencing the worst-case scenario, and that we can therefore take a business as usual approach, except for those who have symptoms or contract this influenza. Can the Secretary of State confirm that from later this week, everyone who needs to will be able to access diagnosis and antiviral treatment via the pandemic flu line? Will he say what are the maximum distances to what he describes as local antiviral collection points? Can he explain why pharmacists are being used in some areas but not in others? Why cannot they be used more generally for now, while the numbers involved remain limited?
	Over the weekend, conflicting advice was issued to expectant mothers. Consistent and accurate advice is paramount in a situation in which we are trying to maintain public confidence, so can the Secretary of State tell the House what steps he is taking to ensure that the chief medical officer liaises with the royal colleges and other associations to achieve consistency and clarity of advice to the public?
	An interim solution for the national pandemic flu line is to be put in place. We know that the Treasury delayed until December signing the contract for a full solution with BT. Even so, this March, the Secretary of State's Department said that it could be available by April or May. It should, according to the plan, have been activated in mid-June, when the pandemic alert was declared, but it was not. To that extent, it is a month late. It is clear that much of the confusion that we have seen in that month could have been avoided if the Government had delivered the pandemic flu line on time. BT says that it did all that was asked of it. Who and what caused the delay?
	The Secretary of State still maintains that vaccination could begin by September. There is a great deal of public interest in a potential new vaccine, so it is vital that the Government set out clearly the process for licensing and implementation. Clearly, the fact that a vaccine has been manufactured does not mean that it has been licensed by the European Medicines Agency, the EMEA. We do not yet know whether the EMEA will be able to fast-track licensing based on the mock-up dossier, or whether it will need additional clinical data. We do know that in 1976, the US authorities began a vaccination programme with an unlicensed vaccine that had damaging side-effects. Can the Secretary of State therefore confirm that it is the Government's intention to proceed only with a licensed vaccine?
	I have asked the Secretary of State and his predecessors several times for a debate on vaccine prioritisation. Will he publish the advice on the criteria for that, and on the benefit of vaccinating young adults compared with vaccinating the elderly, who appear to have some acquired immunity? Can he tell us how many people aged 55-plus are estimated to have contracted the virus? Of course, we need also to know who he anticipates will fall into the at-risk category groups for vaccination, coming immediately after health and social care workers.
	We have to plan for many more hospitalisations over coming weeks. The planning assumptions are for a clinical attack rate of up to 30 per cent. Will the Secretary of State now publish the modelling that forms the evidence base for that assumption? What is the basis for his belief that up to 50 per cent. of children may contract this influenza?
	We know that the UK has the smallest number of critical care beds in relation to population of any major health system. May I ask the Secretary of State again what criteria he thinks should be applied to the cancellation of elective operations, and what plans the Government have to train additional NHS staff in the use of non-invasive ventilatory support?
	Finally, last Thursday Margaret Chan of the World Health Organisation warned of the threat that developing countries face and their disadvantage in placing orders for a finite supply of vaccines. What more do the Government intend to do to ensure that access to vaccination reaches the most at-risk groups in developing countries?

Andy Burnham: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks, and I agree with him: I am sure that we would all wish to pass on our condolences to those who have, sadly, seen a loved one die in the current outbreak. I also want to put on record again my thanks to the staff of the national health service, particularly those working at primary care level. I visited the antiviral collection point in Tower Hamlets this morning. Obviously, there has been some very real pressure on staff on the front line, who are dealing with lots of cases. In that part of the country, where staff have dealt with some of the highest levels of pressure, they have coped admirably well. We all owe them a great deal of thanks, as we plan to deal with the further challenges ahead.
	Let me go through the issues that the hon. Gentleman raised; I shall take each one in turn. He asked me first about the policy of containment, and asked whether I would commission a review. I am confident-this is backed up by the advice from experts in the Department-that the containment policy worked well. It allowed us more time and breathing space, and it provided high-quality information, with which we were able to assess the early development of the virus. It is right to say, of course, that there came a point when it was hard to sustain the procedures of the containment policy in areas that were experiencing great pressure. He will recall that we relieved that pressure by allowing the outbreak management phase to commence. Let me just say to him that we will come back to the issue and look again at it-now is not the time to do that-but the early feeling is that the containment period worked well, and bought us time, which helped us to plan.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me about the planning assumptions. I hope that he will agree with my judgment that in this day and age, it is right to share with the public, business and public services the information that is given to the Department and Ministers about the likely effects of the virus, in terms of the spread of disease, hospitalisations and the deaths that sadly occur. I have taken the judgment that we should continue with that policy of openness, but we will at all times explain it and put it in the right context. As he will have heard, in all my statements I have stressed the business as usual message at all times, as have the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Gillian Merron), and Professor Sir Liam Donaldson. I can do so again for the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) today; indeed, I did so in my statement. That is always the context.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me about antiviral collection points and the steps being taken to ensure that they are accessible to people all over the country. He asked whether there should be maximum distances. Obviously, those are matters for every primary care trust. I said in my statement that I have asked that all Members be given information on the local collection points in their constituencies. We will make sure that that information is given before the national pandemic flu service launches. It is possible that pharmacies could play a greater role in developing that network, and I am open to the possibility that any Member, from any part of the House, may bump into me in the next few days and say, We haven't got enough collection points; some people will find it a long distance to travel. Let us have that discussion, and respond to concerns, as we go along. We are confident that from the latter part of this week, we can stand up a service that will significantly relieve pressure on primary care and enable us to get medication to people who need it quickly.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me about the advice for pregnant mothers, which he said was confusing. Let me say again that our advice has not changed. I cannot make that clear enough. The front page of a newspaper stated that one voluntary body had said that people should not plan for a pregnancy-should postpone pregnancy, in effect-and there was a response to that from the Royal College of General Practitioners. I would be grateful if he would listen to this point: comment has been made on the advice prepared a long time ago for H5N1, bird flu, which, as I think he knows, would have been a more serious virus. It is important that care is taken to ensure that the statements that are made relate to the current advice. As I say, that advice has not changed.
	The Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have played a superb role over the past few weeks, and I am sure that they will continue to do so. Both organisations have given clear advice today and in the past week, and of course we will continue to liaise with them to ensure that they can continue to play that role.
	The hon. Gentleman said that the national pandemic flu service was a month late, and asked who had caused the delays. This brings us to the heart of some of the information that the Liberal Democrats were putting out this weekend. I am afraid that they were trying to score a political point when none was justified. As I have explained, when I came into the Department, the clear advice to me was that it would be justified to stand up a new national network-with all the resource, energy and time that that would take-when we had simultaneous outbreaks in many parts of the country and there was not only pressure in two or three places but more sustained pressure across the country.
	I want to refer the hon. Gentleman back to the numbers that I quoted in my statement. I will read them to him again, because they illuminate this point. I said: On 8 July, just six primary care trusts reported exceptional levels of flu-like illness. One week later, that figure had increased to 110. On that day, 15 July, I took the decision-which was endorsed by Cobra-to activate the national pandemic flu service. We could have done it earlier, had the circumstances justified that. I have been clear since I came into the Department that the service could have been activated, should that have proved necessary. The change in the facts on the ground last week justified the activation of the service, and I do not believe that it is right to build a story about long delays and infighting. That has not been the case, and the decision was not technology-driven; it was driven by pressure on the ground.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about a vaccine. There is a difficult discussion to be had about putting in place a prioritisation programme for vaccination that deals with higher-risk groups and health and social care staff at the same time. I believe that that can be done. Given that such a decision will be taken in the next week, or longer ahead, after the House has risen, I undertake to share that information in advance with the Members on both Front Benches, so that they can have an input into the decision.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about a licensed vaccine. I repeat what I said in my statement: we obviously want to ensure that any vaccine is properly and thoroughly tested. A process was put in place for H5N1 but, as we are dealing with a mild virus, the circumstances are now different. The balance of risk attached to pursuing an unlicensed product is obviously much changed, given that this is a mild virus. I know that the hon. Gentleman understands these complexities. For me, the important thing is to get in place the necessary assurances on the vaccine as quickly as possible, so that we can move ahead with a prioritised vaccination programme, come the autumn.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about critical care. We have taken great steps, not just recently but over a long period of time, strategic health authority by strategic heath authority and primary care trust by primary care trust, to ensure that there is sufficient critical care capacity in all parts of England to enable the NHS to cope. The publication of the planning assumptions last week gave further information to help local health services to plan for the expected levels of demand. Of course we will continue to do that at all stages, and to endeavour at all stages to give full answers and all information so that the hon. Gentleman and all other hon. Members can make informed judgments on these important matters.

Sandra Gidley: I thank the Secretary of State for providing a copy of an early draft of his statement. I also add my thanks to health workers who are working on the front line and behind the scenes. I want to start by asking about the advice to pregnant mothers. Why, if the advice has not changed, did the National Childbirth Trust say that it was acting on departmental advice? Why was the website changed so late in the day?
	The right hon. Gentleman talked about patients being advised to contact the national pandemic flu service. They have previously been putting quite a strain on our GPs' services. Will he explain the six-month delay in getting Treasury approval for the hotline? The freedom of information request made it quite clear that there had been a significant delay in signing it off, which could have resulted in an undue work load on our GPs.
	I tabled a parliamentary question on collection points earlier this month, in which I asked
	how many primary care trusts had designated influenza treatment distribution centres on 1 July 2009.-[ Official Report, 13 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 174W.]
	The answer, which I am sure the Secretary of State will be interested to hear, was that the information is not collected centrally. That does not inspire confidence at all. Who is in charge? Does the Department have a handle on what PCTs are doing, or is it all delegated to a different level?
	There have been worrying reports in the newspapers about whether children can receive the vaccine before the final trial results are available. The right hon. Gentleman has tried to reassure us today, but will he explain why manufacturers have been exempted from liability for certain side-effects arising from the vaccines? No decision appears to have been made about the prioritisation of vaccines, yet SAGE-the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts-discussed the matter and made recommendations on 7 July. If that advice was available on 7 July, why has the Department not acted on it, and why are we still waiting for decisions to be made?
	Finally, hospital staff are likely to be catered for, but what about care workers? My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) has been advised by a care home that the PCT said it did not have the resources to give Tamiflu to care workers in the private sector, who would have to pay. Given that those workers are at the front line, and given the crossover between NHS and social care, will the Secretary of State address that? Will he also clarify what quantities of antivirals are left and explain why so few discussions with pharmaceutical wholesalers about the wider distribution of these products have been held?

Andy Burnham: In replying to the hon. Lady, I will endeavour to respond to any points from the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) that I have not answered.
	The hon. Lady began by asking about the advice to pregnant women. I repeat that the advice has not changed. The Department has given very clear advice since the beginning- [Interruption.] Let me be absolutely clear to the hon. Lady in answering her question, which is very important to many people. Advice was given over the weekend that was based on planning for H5N1, so that clearly was not and is not relevant in this case. The advice was subsequently withdrawn by the organisation concerned.
	In those circumstances, it is important to ensure good liaison and sharing of advice, ensuring that different organisations can give their own advice-there is more than one voice in this debate and there is international experience to draw on. At all times, however, we want to give the clearest possible advice, and where further advice or clarification is necessary, we will always provide it. As I said in my statement, the chief medical officer will reissue existing advice, bringing together all the latest information, which I hope will provide some reassurance to the hon. Lady. I do not think that what she said particularly helps in this situation. It is important to recognise that people need clear advice, so we must not and should not invent confusion where there is none.
	On the hon. Lady's claims about a six-month delay, it is important to recognise that the national pandemic flu service is the first of its kind in the world. I am sure that if there were any problems or glitches, Members of all parties would not hesitate to say that it was outrageous and would criticise us for launching a service that had not been properly tested. The service, which is innovative and provides a different approach, will significantly relieve pressure on the primary care front line. Our decision was not technology-driven or, indeed, driven by delays in government. The service has been available for commissioning for some time. With pressure increasing simultaneously in different parts of the country last week, I judged it the right moment to bring this service into being. If we had done that any sooner, however, it could have been a distraction to staff dealing with the early effects of the outbreak in their areas.
	The hon. Lady made a fair point about PCTs and about data on antiviral collection points not being collected centrally. I undertook this week to supply all Members with information on local antiviral collection points before the launch of the new service. She is perfectly entitled to hold me to that commitment.
	SAGE has discussed vaccines and has made recommendations to Ministers. The Cobra civil contingencies committee first discussed the matter at last week's meeting. We recognised that further time might be necessary to consider the higher-risk groups and the order of priority for receiving the vaccine. We must ensure that we strike the right balance in respect of health and social care workers. Of course, that must be linked to schedules for the delivery of vaccine. The issues are complicated and interlinked, but I commit myself to sharing important information with the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire and for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) over the summer.
	The hon. Lady made an important point about private care home workers: such front-line staff must be able to do their job, thereby relieving pressure on the national health service. That point has been relayed to me by various people in recent weeks, and it is not lost on me. We will come to a final decision on the matter soon. The aim of giving vaccine to health and social care workers is to ensure that essential services can operate, and that extra pressure is not put on already overstretched services. That principle will guide our approach to issuing vaccine.

Several hon. Members: rose -

Mr. Speaker: Order. May I say to the House that, at 32 minutes, the statement and Front-Bench exchanges took considerably longer than I would have wanted or expected? I say politely to representatives of the Front Bench that it is almost invariably an unalloyed joy for me to hear them, but it is better for them to leave me hearing less and wanting more, rather than hearing more and wanting less. At least 15 Back Benchers are seeking to put a question, and I want to accommodate them all, so the usual rule applies: short questions and short answers.

Frank Dobson: Will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State give us his assessment of how local parts of the NHS are dealing with the distribution of antiviral drugs? I would not want that question to be interpreted as being in any way critical of what has happened so far, as I commend him, his ministerial colleagues and everyone in the Department and the national health service for their contingency planning and for the implementation of contingency plans, as endorsed by that responsible BBC correspondent Mr. Fergus Walsh, whatever some other people might say.

Andy Burnham: I thank my right hon. Friend. Mr. Walsh has indeed done a superb job in providing balanced coverage to the public, and we pay tribute to him: if coverage is not so well and carefully done, pressure can be put on NHS services as a result of people worrying unnecessarily.
	Let me outline what is happening in Camden: three chemists have extended opening hours; three antiviral collection points will be in place later this week, and I shall ensure my right hon. Friend has the details. I am told that there is a flu car for those without flu friends, so there is a local distribution system for people who might find it hard to get antivirals, and 350 courses of antivirals have been issued to date. The local response varies: some PCTs are putting in plans to respond to the requests of their local community, but in Camden, as he can clearly see, a detailed local operation is already in place.

Nigel Evans: We are now in the holiday season and a lot of people will be going abroad, so what advice does the Secretary of State have for airlines and travellers, especially as nine youngsters have been diagnosed with swine flu in China? Should not those considering going abroad ensure that they have proper insurance: the European health insurance card if they are going to Europe, and proper paid-for insurance if they are going to other countries?

Andy Burnham: The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, as people will be about to travel. It is important that people take the same precautions when travelling as they would when at home. As I have said several times today, it is very important that people travelling within Europe-not just one member of the family, but all family members-have the European health insurance card, as that entitles people to necessary medical treatment, including for swine flu, across the European Union. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will encourage his constituents to ensure that they take that card on holiday. We recommend that if people have swine flu, they do not travel until their symptoms have stopped. We also recommend that people check the Foreign Office website for advice on travel to particular countries. If he wants more detail, I can write to him, but he is correct that people will want clear information on this important matter.

Kevin Barron: The Department, the Secretary of State and his predecessor have handled the swine flu outbreak very sensibly. While I accept that the outbreak has had tragic consequences for a few people, it is still mild and self-limiting. Is it not incumbent on all of us, both Members of Parliament and the media, to ensure that any reporting takes place on that basis, and that people are not panicked into believing there is something in the country that is worse than what we have-and are controlling-at the moment?

Andy Burnham: I thank my right hon. Friend for his kind remarks. The Department has been well served by a number of Ministers, because-as my right hon. Friend will know in his capacity as Chair of the Health Committee-it has planned for this eventuality for a considerable time.
	I agree with my right hon. Friend that everyone-including Members of Parliament and any representative of the media who speaks on a public platform-has a responsibility to deal with this in a calm and measured way following the advice that has been issued. Any unnecessary concern out there could put extra pressure on the NHS front line, and I do not think that anyone would want that. We will rise to the challenge. The NHS has always been a wonderfully resilient organisation, and it will deal with this issue, but let us not make things more difficult for the valuable staff who are in front-line positions.

Iris Robinson: I, too, wish to express my condolences to the families of those who have died from swine flu.
	What discussions have taken place about the contribution that the Treasury will make to dealing with the swine flu pandemic, and with the burden that will fall on the devolved Governments in the United Kingdom? Does he agree that, regardless of the statistics on people who are presenting with swine flu symptoms, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland should offer the same service, given that we call this a national pandemic flu service?

Andy Burnham: I strongly agree with the hon. Lady's second point. We continue to have regular discussions with the four health Ministers, and Michael McGimpsey has been of great assistance in helping us to co-ordinate our response across the United Kingdom. All Ministers-in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England-agree that the right response is a UK-wide response, and that will continue.
	We do not yet know the full cost of the pressure that the outbreak will place on services. We do not know the full cost of the vaccination programme, because we do not yet know how long the outbreak will last. As far as is possible, we must deal with that pressure within existing budgets and resources; but any extra requests for funding would be dealt with in the usual way, according to existing Treasury arrangements.

Glenda Jackson: I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. I am sure he agrees, however, that concern has grown over the definition of pregnant women and the under-fives as vulnerable groups. That is certainly the case in my constituency. Can he reassure my constituents that that vulnerability does not mean that they are more likely than not to contract swine flu? It is certain that in the case of pregnant women there will be no dangers to the unborn child, and it is certain that the treatment for the under-fives is entirely effective.

Andy Burnham: My hon. Friend has made an important point. Some younger people have not encountered this kind of virus before, while some older people have. However, it is not the case that anyone is necessarily more at risk of developing the virus than others; it is a question of people's ability to withstand it after contracting it. That is an important distinction, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me an opportunity to clarify it.

David Tredinnick: Further to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) about travelling, may I point out that the Secretary of State has said nothing about information at airports and ports? Is he issuing leaflets? What about the arrangements for incoming as well as outgoing passengers? What information will be provided, and will any health officers be available?

Andy Burnham: We have not introduced screening at United Kingdom airports, but I take the hon. Gentleman's point about information. I will follow it up, and check that good information is provided at ports of entry. I am grateful to him for bringing the issue to my attention.
	The FCO website states:
	Medical screening for the Swine Flu virus... has been introduced... at several airports for passengers arriving on international flights.
	That includes airports in China, although obviously practice differs elsewhere. In relation to China, the guidance states:
	The Chinese government continues to place great emphasis on screening and surveillance, rapid detection, quarantine and treatment.
	Obviously, we know about the situation with the young children, which emerged over the weekend. We will provide support to them as necessary, but it is for all countries to deal with the outbreak as they see fit.

Jeff Ennis: This global pandemic is affecting our country in our summer months, and it is anticipated that the situation may get worse as we work towards the winter months. Obviously, however, many countries in the southern hemisphere are experiencing the pandemic during their winter months. How closely are we monitoring the levels of infection in countries in the southern hemisphere, so that we can learn from the trends as we work towards our winter months?

Andy Burnham: My hon. Friend makes an important point. I can assure him that the international figures are monitored. At the risk of sounding overly critical, I think that our surveillance systems are better than those in many other countries, so we must exercise some caution in directly comparing the figures from one country with the figures from another. However, we keep a close eye on those figures. Obviously, one of the things about this virus is that it is spreading here during the summer months, which people would not always expect.

Susan Kramer: May I raise again the issue of constituents travelling overseas? Can the Secretary of State assure me that they will be able to contact the national pandemic hotline even if they are overseas, and that there will be some facility to direct them to where they should go, as language and other barriers might mean that they cannot access treatment when they need it?

Andy Burnham: I do not think that people can contact the service from overseas, but that is why I made an important distinction in my statement about people who are travelling. They should take all the necessary precautions, including purchasing over-the-counter medications, heeding the advice on the Foreign Office website and considering whether they should also have, if they are travelling within the European Union, a European Union health insurance card. The hon. Lady has raised an important point. I will see whether there is more we can do to provide reassurance. I would not want us today, when we are launching a new service for Britain, to be distracted by another issue, but if I can provide further reassurance or a better and more detailed answer in next 24 or 48 hours I will do that.

Gisela Stuart: During the school term, it was easy to decide which schools had to close because there were outbreaks among the children. Is the Secretary of State talking to local education authorities about what will happen in September when the children return, because some schools might not wish to reopen?

Andy Burnham: The decision will have to be taken locally according to advice from public health officials. It is always the responsibility of the head teacher and chair of governors, and it would be premature to suggest that there should be widespread school closures. The majority of schools in England have broken up for the summer or are about to do so. We hope that that will have a beneficial impact on the spread of the virus, although we cannot be sure about that. We keep all these matters under discussion, and the Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson), regularly attends our Cobra meetings. We will update advice to schools if and when that is appropriate.

Richard Taylor: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker-[Hon. Members: Mr. Speaker.] I do apologise, Mr. Speaker, for whatever I said. Despite the Secretary of State's welcome assurances about keeping hon. Members in touch, does he agree that it is incomprehensible and further undermines the reputation of this House that, in the face of this and other crises, we break up tomorrow until 12 October, without any inkling of a recall to scrutinise the Government's actions?

Andy Burnham: I think that the arrangements I have put in place, and which I have explained in my statement today, will give hon. Members on both sides of the House, especially the Front-Bench teams, access to the information they need. We will issue a local hotline number, which will not be in the public domain, so that Members of Parliament can pursue any concerns over the summer months. It is very important that everybody keeps this virus in perspective. Parliament needs to keep it in perspective too, and if the situation changes I am sure that there will be conversations through the usual channels, but at this stage it is business as usual. It is important, however, that we have in place systems to make sure that people are properly updated over the summer months.

Andrew MacKinlay: I think the Secretary of State missed the point made by the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) and others about people travelling abroad. A constituent of mine who was on holiday in Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt could not leave the country and was incarcerated-I intend no disrespect-in an Egyptian national health service hospital, where he could not get any consular advice. Over the next few weeks, this scenario-involving, perhaps, people who, rightly or wrongly, have not arranged sufficient travel insurance-is likely to escalate enormously, putting enormous strain on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There need to be amber lights flashing to the FCO and the travel and insurance industries to make sure that a potentially large number of people are not incarcerated outside the European Union in grotty hospitals.

Andy Burnham: May I say three things to my hon. Friend? First, before they travel people should check the arrangements for dealing with swine flu in each country. Secondly, they should have appropriate insurance in place, should that be necessary. Thirdly, of course we will ensure with colleagues in the Foreign Office that there is appropriate consular advice and support for anybody who finds themselves in a difficult position. Those three things are absolutely vital-and for people travelling within Europe, the European health insurance card is, of course, a crucial document, and nobody should go on holiday without one.

Ben Wallace: The Secretary of State said he envisaged receiving supplies of the vaccinations by August and that he was prioritising vulnerable groups and vital NHS front-line staff. I am the husband of a wife who is seven months pregnant and due in September, so will he tell me whether he is considering putting women who are in the later stages of pregnancy in any of those vulnerable groups? What steps is he putting in place for hospital maternity units, because the babies of women who have recently given birth are particularly vulnerable?

Andy Burnham: On the latter point, hospitals have, of course, sophisticated systems for ensuring the safety of the ward environment. On the hon. Gentleman's first point, I can assure him that pregnant women are within the priority groups of those considered at higher risk. SAGE has given Ministers the conclusions on those groups. We have had our first discussion of them, but I can confirm that women in pregnancy are included. As and when appropriate-and not before too long, I hope-we will make public who is in those groups. The hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) asked that we do that, and I have no problem with it. We want at all stages to be open about the advice that we are receiving, but we must look at the vaccination programme alongside the operational requirements to ensure that health care staff and social care staff are vaccinated. These are the issues, alongside the delivery schedule for the vaccine, that we are currently balancing.

Mike Hancock: Does the research confirm whether people can get swine flu twice and whether antivirals and Tamiflu injections are of any benefit in preventing a second bout of swine flu? What work is being done to ensure that a vaccination for swine flu does not counter the normal vaccinations that are given to so many people in this country for winter flu, and on whether those two injections have any effect on each other?

Andy Burnham: rose-

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) slipped in three questions, but I feel sure that the Secretary of State will furnish us with just one answer.

Andy Burnham: Perhaps I will write to the hon. Gentleman to cover all those issues, but if he was asking whether people can get the vaccine or antivirals twice, I can say that the national pandemic flu service has an authorisation code that is meant to stop precisely that problem, so that the antivirals can go around to everybody.

Greg Hands: May I take the Secretary of State back to a statistic he gave us earlier orally but which does not seem to appear in the written version of his statement? I think he said that there are currently 652 people in hospital with swine flu, of whom 53 are in critical care. That seems like a rather high proportion. How does that compare with other, more conventional forms of influenza, and does it mean that we are not getting people to hospital fast enough?

Andy Burnham: No, I do not think that it means that at all. We can give the hon. Gentleman figures on the hospitalisation rate if he would find them useful. It is important for me to say that we are at the early stage of a new virus, and although we want to give the House the figures as openly as possible as we receive them, this is a developing situation and I do not believe that he should read too much into them at this stage. We have given him the figures, they are being updated every week and people can make their own judgments on them.

John Hemming: At the previous statement on swine flu, the Minister had no answer to the question about what is being done about people getting cross-infected on a plane flying into this country. We have this strange situation where the Government seem to have done nothing to discourage people from flying into the country, while airlines are turning people away and preventing them from flying out of it with swine flu. What is the Government's rationale for that? What threshold would there be before they did something to discourage people from flying in and infecting people on the plane?

Andy Burnham: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman thinks that we should stop incoming flights-perhaps he does. From the beginning, the advice from the World Health Organisation was that, given what we knew about this virus, it would not be justifiable to place restrictions on international travel. That was the clear position at the start and I have not seen any WHO advice to change it. Obviously we pay close attention to what the WHO says at all times.

Tobias Ellwood: There has been a lot of talk about the FCO website and tourism abroad, but I am interested in what is happening to tourism in Britain. We are very much open for business, yet we see headlines such as today's Holidaymakers face travel ban as swine flu sweeps country. What conversations has the Secretary of State had with the tourism Minister to ensure that such headlines are placed in context and that the message goes out that Britain is very much open for business?

Andy Burnham: I think that I just gave that message in answer to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming). Britain is very much open for business and, as I say, it is business as usual for the vast majority of people. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a representative who attends the Cobra civil contingencies committee, and I am sure that in terms of business continuity we will continue to listen carefully to what he or she says. As I mentioned in my statement, we are developing strong networks for business, in order to give it the advice that it needs. That is being led by the Cabinet Office and it will be useful to tourism, as well as to other businesses.

Adrian Sanders: I am wearing my all-party group on diabetes hat here. Will all diabetics have access to the vaccine, or will a distinction be drawn between people with diabetes that is controlled by diet and exercise and other people with diabetes?

Andy Burnham: At this stage, I do not want to give all the information about the vaccination programme piece by piece. I gave an answer to the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace) because there has been a lot of focus of women in pregnancy and giving further information on that is justified. We will say more in due course. Obviously we are purchasing enough vaccine to vaccinate the whole country, although not all that vaccine will arrive in this calendar year. Thus, we are putting forward a programme of priority vaccination for the autumn, about which we will say more in due course.

Peter Bone: This morning, I rang a travel insurance medical hotline to seek advice about swine flu, but before I got through to someone I heard a pre-recorded message saying, We can give you no advice about swine flu. What advice is the Secretary of State giving the travel insurance industry? If I go abroad with a slight temperature would I invalidate my travel insurance were I to get swine flu?

Andy Burnham: That is a matter for the insurers; it is not necessarily a matter for me. I have said clearly throughout this statement that people should carefully check the FCO website and other advice before they travel, and they should not travel if they have symptoms. That advice is clear and if the hon. Gentleman has a query about his insurance policy, he should raise it with his insurer.

Charles Walker: The Secretary of State is correct to say that swine flu is important and serious, but we must keep a sense of perspective, because the truth is that over the next six to 12 months many more of our constituents will develop cancer and heart disease and die from those illnesses. Will he join me in urging the media to report the illness of swine flu responsibly, thereby avoiding mass hysteria?

Andy Burnham: It is important to acknowledge-as the hon. Gentleman did-that accurate, balanced and calm reporting of this virus is necessary. If that tone is not struck, it puts pressure on the NHS and limits its ability to cope with the daily pressures, which continue, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says. The launch of the national pandemic flu service will take pressure off the health service by creating an alternative route for access to medication, and that will go a long way to helping to relieve pressure on the front line. We all have a responsibility to face up to the challenges as they come up, to deal with them as best we can, and to explain them as calmly and concisely as we can, which will help the whole country get through this challenge.
	In conclusion, may I say that the NHS will get through this challenge, because it is wonderfully resilient? It has faced many challenges before and will face this one in the same way.

Parker Pen Factory, Newhaven

Application for emergency debate (Standing Order No. 24)

Norman Baker: I rise to propose that the House should debate the matter of the decision to close the Parker Pen Factory, Newhaven.
	This is a specific and important matter that should be given urgent consideration. The decision to close the factory, taken by the American parent company, Newell Rubbermaid, will result in the loss of 180 jobs. This will have a terrible effect on the population of Newhaven, which is already suffering far more from the effects of the recession than other nearby towns such as Lewes. There has been a pen factory in Newhaven since 1921 and it has been Parker since 1945. Indeed, Parker Pen is the flagship employer in Newhaven, but the keystone of the bridge is now being removed.
	The factory was visited by Mrs. Thatcher when she was Prime Minister, and it has a loyal work force in Newhaven, which has done its best to support Parker Pen over the years. There is a suspicion that the factory is being closed because the much stricter French employment laws make it more difficult to close the factory in Nantes-to which the jobs are being transferred. In other words, the employment laws in this country, which are supposed to encourage employment, will have the opposite effect on this occasion.
	Whether you allow a debate or not, Mr. Speaker, I ask Ministers on the Treasury Bench to note the need for an urgent support package for Newhaven, which has suffered grossly from the recession, with a significant unemployment problem and the town centre being in a poor way. The support-or even rescue-package for the town should be put in place through the South East England Development Agency, with Ministers from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and help from Jobcentre Plus to deal with the 180 employees who will, sadly, lose their jobs. I ask Ministers to work with me for the benefit of my constituents.
	I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to make this case for my constituents.

Mr. Speaker: I have listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman has said, and I have to give my decision without stating any reasons. I am afraid that I do not consider that the matter that he has raised is appropriate for discussion under Standing Order No. 24, and I cannot therefore submit the application to the House.

Points of Order

Michael Penning: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I wish to raise a point of order that may sound trivial, but is a matter of serious disappointment for young people in my constituency. For the last four years in the run-up to Christmas, choirs from my constituency have entertained parliamentarians, staff and other members of the Palace authorities over lunch. Last week, out of the blue, an e-mail arrived at my office saying that this would be banned in the future, as it was inconveniencing Members of the House during their lunch. Were you aware of that, Mr. Speaker? Surely we should be encouraging young people to come to this House, not barring them.

Mr. Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the point of order that he has raised. I confess that I was not previously conscious of it, as will probably be apparent to him and the House by the rather measured terms of my response. Suffice it to say that, on the face of it, he and his constituents have reason to be disconcerted, and I will certainly look into the matter. I am happy to revert to the hon. Gentleman when I have done so.

Andrew MacKinlay: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You recently made it clear to Ministers that you expect substantive replies to parliamentary questions before the summer recess, which is a little more than 24 hours off. May I draw this to your attention and seek your support? Frankly, the biggest offender, in my view, is the Prime Minister himself. To buttress my argument, and to illustrate the point, I point out that I asked a question of the Prime Minister about his meeting with President Gaddafi, at the margins of a recent summit, in relation to matters raised by the hon. Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Dodds) and me about compensation for the victims of IRA Semtex whose provenance was Libya. The Prime Minister sent me a letter saying that was referred to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but the only person who could answer my question was the Prime Minister himself-not even the Foreign Secretary. I also asked about the per diem remuneration for members of Chilcot, and the Prime Minister said that was a matter for Chilcot. He refuses to answer a simple question.
	Mr. Speaker, will you, first, ensure that there are substantive replies from all Ministers by tomorrow and, secondly, look at the Prime Minister, who dodges the question time and again? I am certainly not prepared to put up with that.

Mr. Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order, which was put to me and the House in the characteristically blunt terms that the House has come to appreciate. I know that the hon. Gentleman would not seek to inveigle me into an argument between him and the Prime Minister, but what I would say to him is that who answers a question that the hon. Gentleman or any other hon. or right hon. Member poses is a matter for the head of the Department or, in this case, for the Prime Minister. Similarly, the content of such answers is a matter for Ministers and I cannot get into that.
	What I can say to the hon. Gentleman is that the exhortation I issued to all Ministers to ensure that substantive replies were provided before the summer recess was an exhortation that extended to the Prime Minister as well, because he, of course, is a Minister. Moreover, I think I can gently say to the hon. Gentleman, who is an extremely experienced Member of the House, that he might feel tempted to try to give voice to some of these concerns in a little more detail in the Adjournment debate that will take place immediately prior to the summer recess tomorrow.

BILL PRESENTED
	  
	Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
	Mr. Secretary Straw, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary David Miliband, Secretary Alan Johnson, Tessa Jowell and Michael Wills, presented a Bill to make provision relating to the civil service of the State; to make provision relating to the ratification of treaties; to amend section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 and make provision relating to the removal, suspension and resignation of members of the House of Lords; to repeal sections 132 to 138 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and to amend Part 2 of the Public Order Act 1986; to make provision relating to time limits for human rights claims against devolved administrations; to make provision relating to judges and similar office holders; to make provision relating to the Comptroller and Auditor General and to establish a body corporate called the National Audit Office; to amend the Government Resources and Accounts Act 2000 and to make corresponding provision in relation to Wales.
	 Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 142) with explanatory notes (Bill 142-EN).

Child Poverty Bill

[Relevant Documents: The transcript of oral evidence taken before the Work and Pensions Committee on 17 June 2009 on Child Poverty, HC 702; Second Report of the Work and Pensions Committee, Session 2007-08, HC 42-I, on The best start in life? Alleviating deprivation, improving social mobility and eradicating child poverty; and the Government response, Second Special Report of the Committee, Session 2007-08, HC 580.]
	 Second Reading

Yvette Cooper: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
	I hope that the Bill will have support from all parts of the House. I believe it is one of the most radical Bills we have debated in this Parliament. It sets out a vision of a fairer society that is bold and ambitious-a vision of equality and opportunity for our children that goes further than any other European country currently achieves. It entrenches that vision in our legislation for the long term.
	We know that no law alone can end child poverty, but the Bill will help to hold the Government's feet to the flames in pursuit of a fairer Britain. It will demand of Governments, now and in the future, determined action to cut child poverty and to stop children being left behind. Those are bold ambitions, but they are the right ambitions.
	The Bill does more than simply set out targets; it embeds a set of values in our primary legislation. For a start, it is the chance for Parliament to make it clear that children in the 21st century should not grow up suffering deprivation, and that they should not grow up lacking the necessities that most of us take for granted, and which allow them to participate fully in society-things such as keeping the house warm, being able to go on a week's holiday or being able to afford a bike to get out and about with friends. We are setting a clear target to cut the number of children growing up in low-income and material deprivation.

John Redwood: Why then have inequalities of income grown over the past 12 years? What will the Government do now to make that different in their final year in office?

Yvette Cooper: As the right hon. Gentleman will know, the figure on child poverty has in fact dropped over the past 12 years, in contrast to its having doubled over the previous 12 years. He will know too that our measure of child poverty is a relative poverty measure-it is an inequality measure. It is one of the most important things the Government have done to stop the inexorable rise in child poverty that his party and the Government of whom he was part presided over, and indeed encouraged when they chose to freeze child benefit three years in a row, so that, shockingly, in 1997 the level of child benefit was lower in real terms than it was in 1979. That is why it is so important that we have taken action to cut the number of children in poverty by half a million, with other measures in place to reduce it further.

Gary Streeter: The right hon. Lady talks about the values that underpin the Bill, and I certainly welcome those. Clause 8(5) lists a number of things that have to be taken into account in assessing and measuring progress once the Bill becomes law, including considerations relating to skills, employment and housing. Why is there nothing about the stability of the family environment? Surely that is one of the most important things for any child, is it not? Why is the Bill silent on that?

Yvette Cooper: It is right that we support families, and we should support families of all kinds, whatever their circumstances. That includes helping them to have stability in their lives-stability for children as they grow. It is also right that we recognise what the Government can do and where the Government can take action to support families. That is why there is also a serious vision of equality embedded in the Bill. Labour's child poverty targets have never just been about poverty; they have always been about narrowing the unfair inequalities that can haunt children throughout their lives.

David Heath: I entirely support the right hon. Lady's contention, but I am puzzled because the Government's position on this Bill, which sets out targets and makes it a duty on the Secretary of State to meet them, is different from the one they adopted on my Fuel Poverty Bill, in which I set out targets and placed a duty on the Secretary of State to meet them. I was told:
	That is an absolutist position, and it cannot be acceptable to any Government.-[ Official Report, 20 March 2009; Vol. 489, c. 1199.]
	I was told that it would be opposed at all costs. Have Ministers changed their minds about the appropriateness of such a step?

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman is right in that it is indeed a radical thing for us to set Secretaries of State a duty to meet targets to cut child poverty and to abolish it by 2020, as set out in the Bill. We considered long and hard how best to embody the targets and the duty in the legislation because we think that ending child poverty is serious and will have an impact throughout the country.
	Concerns about fuel poverty are reflected in the assessment of material deprivation, so we take the issue very seriously. The hon. Gentleman will realise that, for example, there are families who are concerned about being able to pay their fuel bills this winter, which has an impact on their children. We have taken an overarching approach to child poverty which looks at a series of separate targets because this is about opportunities for every child for many generations to come.
	We believe that every child should get a fair start in life, and every child should have the chance to get on, to develop their potential and to chase their dreams. We believe in equality of opportunity for children as they grow, but we can make those opportunities real only if we also tackle the poverty and inequality that holds children back today. We know that children from low-income families do less well at school. We know that children on free school meals are only half as likely as the rest of their class mates to get five good GCSEs. We know that being left behind can be about missing out on educational school trips or music lessons, or not being able to get on the internet at home to research homework. It can mean cases such as those in the Barnardo's report out today of the 14-year-old boy Jelani who got nothing at all for his birthday-except for £10 from a friend that he gave to his mother to help towards the cost of his school uniform. Children get left behind for years to come if their family get left behind today.

John Howell: Given the case that the right hon. Lady started to make-that there are many factors involved in deprivation-can she tell us why the targets that she has chosen are simply income-based? Surely they should be broader.

Yvette Cooper: In fact, as I have just explained, the material deprivation target looks more broadly at the kinds of material circumstances in which families can find themselves. However, we have been clear that it is right to look at the relative poverty target because of the impact that that has on other aspects of children's lives, and for all their lives.
	We also know that if we are concerned to increase family income, often the best way of doing so is by looking at how to get more parents into work and increase their skills and employability, so that they can get better-paid jobs in future. However, we also know that family income can have a significant impact on children's chances throughout their lives. It is simply unfair that some children should fall so far behind others and lose their chance to get on in life and properly fulfil their potential because of their family circumstances in early childhood.
	Our main child poverty target has always been a relative poverty target and it must stay so. It means that as society becomes more prosperous, all our children must share in that prosperity. As the incomes of better-off families grow, the poorest families must not get left further behind, because if they do their children will fall further behind-and not just today, but potentially for decades to come.
	The Bill goes further, because for the first time we are highlighting the importance of tackling persistent poverty. That, after all, is where the greatest harm for children lies. In the end, no Government action can prevent everything that goes wrong in families or causes problems for the children. However, we can work to help to get people the support that they need as soon as possible, so that the family is not trapped in poverty for years at a time.

Steve Webb: It is clearly an evil for a child to be persistently poor. Likewise, it is an evil for a pensioner to be persistently poor, year in, year out. We welcome the Bill but, having legislated to eliminate child poverty, does the Secretary of State have a time scale in mind to legislate to eliminate pensioner poverty, or is that a second-order priority?

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman will know that we have made substantial progress in cutting pensioner poverty, lifting pensioners out of poverty through measures such as the winter fuel allowance and the pension credit in particular, which has provided substantial support for pensioners. Therefore, the chances of being in poverty are now much higher for children than they are for pensioners. That is why we are saying now that the target to end child poverty in a generation is sufficiently important to embed it in legislation and make clear progress on it in future years.
	We have seen significant changes over the past 12 years. When we started in 1997, child poverty had been rising for 18 years. In fact, child poverty doubled between 1979 and 1997.

John Battle: I welcome the Bill, which I think will prove to be a significant milestone in tackling poverty in our country. I particularly welcome the provisions on local government. In order to meet the targets, can we encourage and support local government in all parts of the country to make rooting out poverty a top priority?

Yvette Cooper: My right hon. Friend is right to suggest that local government often has considerable ability to make a genuine difference in local communities, tackling the estates with the highest levels of child poverty, helping parents into work or tackling problems that children in certain communities can face. That is why we have set out duties on local government in the Bill, including the duty to work with other agencies, such as the local police, the local health service and other organisations across the community. Tackling child poverty cannot be about just national Government; it cannot be about just local government.
	The number of children in absolute poverty has halved since 1997 and the number in relative poverty has dropped by 500,000. We expect the measures that were recently introduced, including increases in the child tax credit, to lift a further 500,000 out of relative poverty. More than 600,000 more lone parents are in work, while the minimum wage has helped to tackle poverty pay. Some 3,000 Sure Start children's centres are helping 2.4 million young children and their families, while £20 billion of support for families is being provided through the tax credit system-measure after measure sadly opposed by the Conservatives. Yet if we had not done that-if we had followed the Conservative approach and simply uprated the tax and benefit system by inflation each year since 1997-2.1 million more children would be in poverty today.

John Mason: The Minister mentions the minimum wage and relative income, on which I completely agree with her. However, is there also a place for absolute figures? Does the minimum wage perhaps need to be higher, or do we need some kind of minimum income standard?

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman will know that we take advice from the Low Pay Commission on the level at which the minimum wage should be set. We have also introduced tax credits, including the working tax credit and the child tax credit, to provide additional income for families. That has made a substantial difference of thousands of pounds a year to many families, without which many more would be in poverty today: it is transforming families' lives.
	However, this is not enough-we need to go much further. We need to be even more ambitious in future. We know that achieving these targets will not be easy. The very fact of setting a relative target means that as the economy grows and society becomes more prosperous, we have to work even harder to make sure that no one gets left behind. We know, too, that the challenge facing us is even more difficult in our current economic circumstances, but it is also even more important that we succeed. Over the past 18 months, we have continued to set out new measures to tackle child poverty, even in tougher times, including increasing tax credits, expanding child care, and increasing support for parents to get back into work. Everyone knows that it will be difficult to meet our target of halving child poverty by next year, but we believe that it is right to keep working towards it and to make as much progress as we can, even in more difficult times.
	The recession makes action on child poverty even more important. The action that we take now is critical to preventing child poverty not just today but for many years to come. It was the failure of Tory Governments to help people through the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s that led to the big increases in child poverty at that time. Too many parents in the '80s and '90s lost their jobs and were abandoned, left in long-term unemployment or pushed on to other long-term benefits to fiddle the figures, with devastating consequences for them and for their families. Parents, and young people who were soon to become parents, not only fell out of work but fell out of the labour market altogether, making it harder for them to get back on their feet when the upturn came. The cost of that Conservative neglect was felt not just among the parents but among their children who are themselves parents today.
	The Tories are sometimes accused of abandoning a generation: the truth is they abandoned several generations.  [ Interruption. ] Conservative Members do not want to hear about the consequences for future generations, and for child poverty today, of their inaction and their abandonment of young people-future parents-in previous recessions .

Theresa May: The Secretary of State is making a great claim that the Government have done so much over the past 12 years. Why, then, have we just seen a record rise in unemployment, why is youth unemployment higher than when this Government came into office, and why has child poverty been rising for the past few years?

Yvette Cooper: The right hon. Lady is opposing all the action that we are taking to help people who are unemployed. We are facing the first worldwide recession since the second world war; right across every country in the world job losses are increasing and unemployment is rising. The difference between my party and hers is that we believe we should not turn our backs on people. We believe that we should invest in people's futures and help them to get back to work. Her party has repeatedly refused to support the £5 billion extra investment to help the unemployed back to work. I will give way to any Conservative Front Bencher who can tell me now that they will support the £5 billion additional investment to help young people to get back into work.  [ Interruption. ] Hon. Members chatter from the Front Bench, but none of them has the confidence or the guts to stand up at that Dispatch Box and tell us that they will support the £5 billion additional investment in helping people who are losing their jobs today-shame on them. Once again, they are refusing to support people, and that will put more families into poverty in the future. Once again, they cannot accept that it was their failure to act in the early '80s and early '90s-a failure that they intend to repeat-that has left so many children in unemployed households now.

Charles Walker: rose-

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman is keen to intervene from the Back Benches. I will give way to him in the hope that he will go further than his Front Benchers are prepared to and say that he is ready to support the £5 billion investment to help people back into work today.

Charles Walker: I just want to get back to serious politics for a moment, if the Secretary of State will allow me. She claims to care about the welfare of children, so why is it that over the past 10 years child obesity rates have rocketed under her Government?

Yvette Cooper: I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that there is nothing more serious than helping parents back into work right now or tackling the rising unemployment that we have seen in every country in the world-

Charles Walker: Answer the question.

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman might not think that is serious-he might not think the need to tackle child poverty is serious-but he should be ashamed of his party's refusal to support- [ Interruption. ]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. This is a very serious matter.

Charles Walker: And it is a disgraceful performance-

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman asked a question.

Charles Walker: And I have not had an answer-

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman may not like the answer he gets, but he must not keep chuntering from a sedentary position. Otherwise, he ought perhaps to be asked to leave the debate if he cannot control himself. It does not help the debate at all.

Yvette Cooper: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I agree with the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) that we need to do more to support children who have health problems, including obesity, but we also have to help those children out of poverty. If his party will not face up to the fact that parents who lose their jobs are far more likely still to be in poverty in years to come if they do not get help to get back into work now, he is blind to the serious problems of child poverty across this country.

John Redwood: Why can the Secretary of State not answer my question on income differentials, the shadow Secretary of State's question on child poverty, and the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) on obesity? Why does she always have to play crude and idiotic politics instead of dealing with the things that really matter to our constituents?

Yvette Cooper: Not only is that not a question, but the right hon. Gentleman still has not said whether his party is prepared to support the action and investment to do something about child poverty. We have seen-the figures show this-that 500,000 children have been lifted out of poverty as a result of the action that the Government have taken. If we had simply followed the policies of the previous Government-his Government-child poverty would be 2.1 million higher than it is today.

Philip Hammond: It is not sustainable.

Yvette Cooper: The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury sits there on the Front Bench and says it is not sustainable, we cannot invest, we cannot do anything, we cannot do this, we cannot do that-we cannot afford not to bring child poverty down. We cannot afford not to bring unemployment down. He might think that we should not invest £5 billion in helping the unemployed, but we think that if we do not invest in supporting the unemployed to get back into work, unemployment will stay higher for longer. That will push up debt for longer, too.

John Barrett: Does the Secretary of State agree that one way of getting more people out of poverty would be to ensure that means-tested benefits were given out, including to those in work? The DWP admits that £10 billion of unclaimed benefits are waiting to be used. That would be one way of reducing the numbers of those in poverty.

Yvette Cooper: We have to do everything that we can to increase the take up of benefits. The hon. Gentleman is right-more can be done, particularly with things such as housing benefit and council tax benefit. As part of the reforms to housing benefit, we have been considering what more we can do to help those who are in work and who may be entitled to housing benefit. It may also help to make it pay for people to go back into work.

Sammy Wilson: Although I think that the whole House will support the stated aims of the Bill, does the Secretary of State not recognise that behind the rhetoric the stark statistics show that 200,000 more children are now in child poverty than in 2004? The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the Government's policies will lead to the target for 2010-11 being missed by 600,000. On that basis, although the Minister claims that the Government are concerned about child poverty the facts show something totally different.

Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman knows that the current statistics do not yet include figures for operating the child element of child tax credit in April 2008, the child maintenance disregard for out-of-work benefits in October 2008, the increase in child benefit in 2009 and a series of other measures that have still to feed through. However, I agree with him that it is difficult to make progress, given the worldwide global credit crunch and its impact. It is important to help parents back into work because we know that long-term unemployment causes long-term child poverty, which we experienced in previous generations. That is why helping parents back into work was such an important part of the Budget measures that we announced earlier this year.

Joan Humble: Earlier the Secretary of State referred to the key role of Sure Start children's centres. Surely by doing more through our Sure Start children's centres, we can provide information and advice to parents about health and nutrition so that we reduce childhood obesity. We can also build up parents' self-esteem and provide training so that they are in a better position to get into work and lift their children out of poverty.

Yvette Cooper: My hon. Friend is right. The Sure Start programme is hugely important in providing opportunities for young people and support for their families. It can help parents in a child's early years, which can be a vulnerable time for families, when they want and need more support. Sure Start has proved to be an excellent way to provide that support. That is why it is not enough simply to back the Bill-one also has to back the means to deliver it. That includes the Sure Start scheme and not cutting it, as Conservative Members would do. If they are serious about supporting the Bill, I challenge them to say that they support the £5 billion investment to help the unemployed and the £1 billion for the future jobs fund to guarantee young people a job rather than leaving them in long-term unemployment. I challenge them to guarantee now that they will not cut the Sure Start programme, which provides so much support for young people throughout the country and helps to tackle child poverty, too.
	Conservative Members say that they care about child poverty, but they cannot will the ends and cut the means. The Labour Government are serious about cutting child poverty and the Bill sets out our determination to go further. We are determined to help more parents into work and to get the skills and training they need for well-paid jobs to support children and families as they grow, while also ensuring that work is family friendly so that parents can combine employment and parental responsibilities.
	Today, we are announcing more support to help parents hit by the global credit crunch. We know that parents are still losing jobs because of the worldwide recession, but often second earners do not go to the jobcentre for help if their partner is still in work. Yet that extra cash from their part-time or full-time jobs could be vital to help to pay the mortgage or keep the family out of poverty. Indeed, more than 100,000 children could be lifted out of poverty if more second earners worked part time or full time as the children get older. That is why we must do more to help second earners who are affected by the recession, and why we are announcing today a further £10 million to help working mothers who are affected by the recession and help more parents into work. Those funds will be targeted at 25 local authority areas to help to set up job clubs in schools to advise parents on getting access to training, finding work or setting up small businesses.
	Tackling child poverty is also about acting across the board to ensure that children do not get left behind: from one-to-one tuition to free fruit for primary school children; from the work of neighbourhood police with troubled teenagers to the decent homes programme to put central heating into family homes. Tackling child poverty is everyone's business and that is why the Bill is so important.
	The measure requires the Government to work with the devolved Administrations, local councils, the police, the NHS and organisations throughout the country to tackle child poverty in each and every community. It requires every area to set out its own local strategy to tackle child poverty, as well as the Government to set out the national strategy. It establishes a commission of experts to advise us and help drive us forward. It will force Governments to come back to Parliament time and again to demonstrate the progress being made. It ultimately means that the Government will be at risk of action in the courts if they fail.
	We are considering a bold Bill, which sets out a radical vision of a fairer society, and a Labour vision of a fairer society. Whereas the Tories doubled child poverty, we are determined to end it. Whereas we want to cut child poverty, they want to cut children's services. Whereas we want to help today's parents, they want to cut the help they need to get back to work. Our priority is to tackle the inequality that prevents our children from getting a fair chance in life, and theirs is to widen inequality by cutting inheritance tax for millionaires. I urge the whole House to back this Bill and to back the long-term measures that are needed to make it a reality. I commend the Bill to the House.

Theresa May: Eradicating child poverty is an ambitious but important aspiration for any Government of this country. Not only is it an economic imperative, as no advanced economy can afford to waste the potential of so many of its citizens; more importantly it is a moral imperative, as no decent society should allow children to grow up in poverty.
	Let us be clear that poverty exists in 21st century Britain, and for some communities it is the norm and not the exception. That situation is shameful and destructive. Some 10 years ago, the Government made a commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020. We can disagree about the approach that has been taken and the lack of progress that has been made, but we should all recognise the importance of setting out that ambition.
	I reiterate the Conservative party's support for ending child poverty, and I remind hon. Members of the words of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. He stated last year:
	I want...the government I aspire to lead to be judged on how we tackle poverty in office. Because poverty is not acceptable in our country today.

Jamie Reed: Can we be clear about this? Is the commitment of the right hon. Lady's party an actual commitment or simply an aspiration?

Theresa May: If the hon. Gentleman listens to my words, he will find out exactly what our position on this particular issue is. I suggest that he should perhaps take up the difference between an aspiration and a commitment with his party's Front Benchers, who have singularly failed to meet their child poverty target. Not only that, but they have now downgraded their child poverty target for 2010, as is reflected in the Bill. The Government are going to miss not only that target but their 2020 target, which illustrates the fact that setting targets is not what makes a difference.
	As I indicated earlier in my intervention on the Secretary of State, to which there was no reply, things are moving in the wrong direction, because child poverty is now rising. Since 2004-05, it has risen by 400,000 after housing costs, meaning that there are 4 million children still living in poverty in the UK. The number of children falling below thresholds of low income and material deprivation rose by 200,000 in the last year for which figures are available. In fact, incomes for the poorest 20 per cent. of families fell in the past year, and have fallen in every year since 2004. All that means that across a range of indicators, income inequality is rising.

Steve Webb: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May: I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I call Ed Davey.

Steve Webb: It is Steve Webb, but if I say something stupid it is Ed Davey.  [Laughter.] No, I take that back.
	The shadow Secretary of State commits herself to the aspirations of the Bill, which I welcome. She will have read the regulatory impact assessment, which costs achieving the Bill's goal at about £21 billion a year. Does she have any views on where that money might come from?

Theresa May: The hon. Gentleman will know as well as I do that one omission from the Bill, and from the Secretary of State's speech, is any recognition of the difficulty for any Government of finding the money to meet the figures in the regulatory impact assessment. One issue that I shall mention is how we should be addressing child poverty in this country, which is not just a matter of money. There are many other aspects that affect child poverty in this country, and I shall deal with some of them in my speech.
	I return to the fact that the Government are missing their targets. That is a tragic failure and a damning indictment of 12 years of Labour government. The Bill represents one of the last acts of a tired Government.

Karen Buck: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May: No, not at this stage.
	The Bill ties a future Government to the targets that the current Government have failed to achieve. The Secretary of State may believe that that is clever party politics, but I say to her that such cynical positioning is undignified and belittles the important issues that the Bill should raise. It also sets this whole debate in the realm of the unrealistic; we are all aware of the tremendous pressures on the public finances, yet Ministers seem to have given only a perfunctory nod to such considerations when drafting the Bill.
	It is important to remember that poverty is not only about economics. In too many parts of our country, we see not just poverty of income, but poverty of opportunity, aspiration and environment. A child who grows up without the opportunities of good education, health care or housing is also a child growing up in poverty. Those lost opportunities may relate to things that many of us in this Chamber took for granted when we were growing up-going on school trips, making visits to museums or swimming pools, taking a holiday, whether in the UK or abroad-but for too many British children, those are experiences that they will never enjoy.
	When we talk about child poverty, we are also talking about family poverty. Children are poor because their parents are poor. In fact, I would almost like to change the name of the Bill from the Child Poverty Bill to the child and family poverty Bill. That would help us to remember that tackling poverty can never be a matter simply for children's services. Instead, we must adopt a co-ordinated approach that understands the complex roots of deprivation.

Sally Keeble: The right hon. Lady makes an important point about the wider aspects of poverty, but would she not accept that clause 8, on strategies, deals with the very point that she is making? That is why I think that the Bill is much more than just mechanistic target-setting on income levels.

Theresa May: I will come on to a very important issue that I believe lies behind child and family poverty, but is not referred to in that clause, as my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) pointed out. There are some interesting Government recognitions, not in the Bill but in the regulatory impact assessment and the explanatory notes-I shall mention them later-which suggest that they are at last, after 12 years, beginning to realise that there is more to the issue than finance.

John Redwood: Does my right hon. Friend agree that if Ministers are serious about tackling the issue, they should do it, and lead on it? We do not need another useless quango-the child poverty commission-set up at enormous expense, burdening taxpayers and getting in the way.

Theresa May: My right hon. Friend refers to the issue of quangos. All I would say to him is that, of course, the next Conservative Government will look to ensure that the number of quangos is significantly reduced, so that taxpayers' money is not wasted on bureaucratic bodies that achieve no aims.
	There are aspects of the Bill that we support. We welcome the emphasis on local issues and action, because poverty will never be defeated by grand strategies dreamt up by a Minister in Whitehall. It will take determined work by local government, in partnership with other agencies and, crucially, the voluntary sector. We do not feel that centrally issued diktats will result in the best help for the people who really need it. That is why in Committee we will press the Government for more detail on how the proposals would work in practice, and on how onerous the duty on local authorities will be.
	We have concerns about the emphasis on partner authorities for local councils-the police, strategic health authorities, transport bodies and so on. Again, we will need to be absolutely clear about what that emphasis means in practice, and how much discretion local authorities will have. Surely Government should trust local bodies to know what is best for their communities. We would like to see recognition in the Bill of the valuable work done by charities and other community groups-by those who are working on the ground in the most hard-pressed areas of the country. They often achieve very good results for the people whom they are helping-often, I am afraid, in the face of what Government do to them, rather than alongside Government. Those bodies are central to tackling poverty in the UK, and the Government should be doing all that they can to make their life easier.
	It is not good enough simply to place more obligations on local authorities without them having the resources to act, so we will look to ensure that the Bill does not simply place more bureaucratic burdens on local authorities without giving them the freedom to innovate and act in accordance with local needs. They need the flexibility to work with whatever organisation it is necessary to work with to tackle poverty in their area. We do not want to see them attempting to fulfil their responsibilities simply by appointing a child poverty officer or creating a new department and leaving them alone to get on with the job. Co-ordinating action will be important at local authority level. Many councils will already be doing good work in this area, but bringing that work together with a clear focus on child and family poverty is what will make a difference.

John Mason: I agree with the shadow Secretary of State about not merely giving the voluntary sector and local authorities more responsibilities. She mentioned resources, however, and I wonder whether she and her party will commit to giving extra resources to the voluntary sector and to local authorities to carry out these duties.

Theresa May: One of the most important things that we can do for the voluntary sector is free it up to get on with the job that it wants to do. It often finds itself hard pressed by Government diktats- [ Interruption. ] It is all very well Labour Members laughing. They should look at the state of the public finances, which have been presided over by the Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor as well as now. The fact that we have horrendous debt in this country has nothing to do with the Opposition; it is the fault of the Government and the way in which they have managed the public finances and the economy in this country.
	As it happens, I was about to reflect on the fact that the Government have enshrined in the Bill the principle of taking economic and fiscal circumstances into account. I recognise the point made by Action for Children: tackling child poverty effectively would have a long-term benefit for the fiscal position. Taking that big-picture approach will be more successful than working in silos and ignoring other pressures on the Government and on society.
	However, there are aspects of the Bill about which I have significant concerns, on which we shall press the Government in Committee. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) mentioned quangos. The creation of a commission on child poverty could be a useful step towards holding the Government of the day to account, but we must avoid its becoming another ineffective quango whose purpose is long forgotten. The public will be reluctant to support the creation of another committee that costs taxpayers' money, without clear transparency of purpose. I am also concerned about some obvious omissions from the Bill. It contains little on worklessness, in-work poverty or child care, all of which I will return to later. Housing and health care are also notable absentees.
	My main criticism, however, is a simple one: I do not believe that simply legislating to end child poverty will make that happen. Reaching for the statute book has been this Government's modus operandi since they were elected, and we have precious little to show for all the laws and regulations that they have passed. All the evidence has shown that, instead of a target approach, we need a targeted approach that commits to addressing the root causes of poverty. The Bill does not do that nearly as robustly or comprehensively as it could have done. Perhaps the Minister will tell the House whether the Government, in taking a legislative approach, intend to involve the courts in enforcing the Bill's provisions. These are issues that will need to be probed further in Committee.
	The Government's approach to tackling child poverty over the past 12 years provided some initial success, but, overall, it has been a failure. Their one-dimensional approach, which relies on means-tested benefits only, is unsustainable and will not result in the progress that we all want. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said that
	the strategy against poverty and social exclusion pursued since the late 1990s is now largely exhausted.
	Indeed, the Government now appear to recognise that themselves. Hidden away in the explanatory notes to the Bill is perhaps the most significant statement that the Government have made on this topic for many years:
	The legislation has the effect of requiring Ministers to consider a wide range of interventions through public services and the contribution of broader policy areas. The Government believes this to be a more cost-effective and sustainable route than increasing tax credits and benefits.
	That will be news to many Members present today across the House. I warmly welcome this U-turn, which reverses almost everything that the Prime Minister has told us over the past 12 years.
	We have long argued that we must take a wide-ranging approach to tackling poverty. The approach must focus on the root causes of poverty, including family breakdown, worklessness, educational failure and others. No target will be met, no strategy will be effective and no commission will be worth while without that recognition.

Yvette Cooper: If the right hon. Lady recognises that worklessness is an important cause of child poverty, will she now commit her party to supporting the additional £5 billion to help the unemployed get back into work as part of the fiscal stimulus, or not? Yes or no?

Theresa May: The right hon. Lady makes such a thing of this £5 billion, but I would dearly love to hear her stand up and recognise that some of the money that she is talking about as investment to get people back into work is merely replacing capacity in Jobcentre Plus which has been lost as a result of a decision taken by her Government to continue to shut job centres at an average rate of one a week while unemployment was already rising.
	Let me deal with the areas I have just set out. First, Britain has one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe. There is widespread evidence showing the impact that family breakdown can have on a child's outcomes in life. We know, for example, that children who experience family breakdown are 75 per cent. more likely to suffer from failed education; 70 per cent. more likely to experience problem drug use; and 35 per cent. more likely to experience unemployment or welfare dependency. Those shocking figures surely provide all the evidence we need to accept that family breakdown is one of the most serious challenges we face.
	We will never get to the heart of the problems we face-from crime to debt, from drug addiction to entrenched poverty-if we fail to support the best institution our society has, namely the family. It is central to ensuring the well-being of children; there is no more important way to strengthen our society than to strengthen our families, so we must recognise that family breakdown is a route into poverty for many children.
	I am pleased that the Government have now accepted that, although I am disappointed that that recognition is again hidden away in the notes accompanying the Bill. The regulatory impact assessment contains these important two sentences:
	Poverty may cause more family stress and therefore cause family breakdown. However, conversely, family breakdown may have caused the family to fall into poverty.
	As far as I am aware, this is the first time that the Government have acknowledged that link, and it is a tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and others who have campaigned for so long on this issue.
	The Government must now follow the logic of their own statement and support families in a way that they have failed to do over the last 12 years. That means, for example, ending the couple penalty that has done so much to undermine families and harm children. It is extraordinary that our tax system actually punishes couples who choose to live together. We are in the ridiculous situation where the state appears to encourage couples to pretend to live apart because they would lose out on benefits if it were known that they lived together. What sort of message does that send to families? That must play a part in the fact that 60 per cent. of children in poverty live in couple families, and it is a component of high levels of in-work poverty.
	We have set out proposals to end the couple penalty by increasing the working tax credit for couples, helping 1.8 million of the poorest couples and in doing so lifting 300,000 children out of poverty. I think it is a pity that the Government have not adopted that proposal. I call on the Secretary of State to look again at adopting it, as it is an important step that the Government could take towards meeting their 2020 target.

Yvette Cooper: Will the right hon. Lady tell me how she proposes to pay for that measure? Secondly, does it come first on her priority list, or does it come after cutting inheritance tax for millionaires' estates?

Theresa May: The Secretary of State knows full well how we will pay for the proposal- [Interruption.] Oh yes she does, because we set it out at the time- [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that these are measures that the Government are already taking. Well, that is not the case, as I will show. Sadly, what this Government are doing on welfare reform-I assume she is referring to welfare reform-does not go far enough and will not have a sufficient impact on helping people back into work.

Jamie Reed: rose-

Theresa May: No, I want to make some more progress.
	As it happens, I was about to come to the fact that work provides the only sustainable route out of poverty, which is why it is important to understand that child poverty is parental poverty as well. I am disappointed that the Bill does not give greater attention to the importance of business and economic regeneration. It says little about local enterprise, but that must be a key part of any local partnerships to tackle poverty. We have not begun to tackle the problem of worklessness in this country. We went into the recession with nearly 5 million people claiming some form of out-of-work benefit. Despite one of the most sustained periods of economic growth in our history, hardly a dent has been made on the hard core of welfare dependency, and we are now seeing record rises in unemployment.
	Worklessness and benefit dependency put children and young people at risk of a cycle of poverty, yet Britain has a higher proportion of children living in workless households than any other EU country. The figures show why that is so serious: in households in which all the adults work, a child has only an 8 per cent. chance of being in poverty; in households in which no adults work, that figure rises to 61 per cent. Even the initial progress in reducing child poverty occurred not because of success in tackling high levels of worklessness; one recent report has shown that the number of children living in households in poverty-or those that would be in poverty without tax credits-has increased by nearly 1 million under Labour. Of course, tax credits have been a means of helping the poorest families. However, as the Government now accept, a strategy that relies solely on tax credits, without getting people into work, is not sustainable. Worse, such an approach undermines incentives to work.

Karen Buck: Without support for tax credits, the logic of the right hon. Lady's position is that she is prepared to see parents going into employment even if that employment leaves them below the poverty level. Will she confirm that that is the case?

Theresa May: I did not say that at all, and I suggest that the hon. Lady listens more closely.
	As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has stated, the extension of means-testing has weakened incentives for many people to stay in work and increase their earnings. It rightly warns that the strategy that the Government have clung to for so long might have the effect of increasing poverty by weakening incentives for parents to work. Without a clear recognition of the importance of local enterprise and regeneration, the Bill contains little to tackle the problem of welfare dependency. It is vital that the Secretary of State does not backtrack on the essential programme of welfare reform, which her predecessor began, following our proposals. Instead, I would prefer to see her go further, as we originally proposed and still advocate.
	Part of tackling worklessness is making work pay and making work possible, which involves setting an environment in which good-quality part-time or flexible jobs can be provided for parents, along with high-quality and affordable child care options. I am disappointed that the Bill does not reflect those issues, and I urge the Government to recognise how vital such interrelated aspects of family life are.

Paul Rowen: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May: I will make a little progress.
	Another part of tackling worklessness will be improving the life chances of our poorest children through the education system. Again, it is disappointing that the Bill does not give greater recognition of that. For example, local colleges and universities could be considered as partner authorities for local government. The simple fact is that we need more good school places; poorer children are missing out because of a lack of them. Therefore, instead of backtracking on the academies programme, as the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has, we should build on it by allowing educational charities, philanthropists, existing school federations, not-for-profit trusts, co-operatives and groups of parents to set up new schools in the state sector and access public funding equivalent to that of existing state schools. That would allow the creation of 200,000 new school places.
	We need to divert resources to pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, ensuring that they get the earliest possible opportunity to choose the best schools and teaching, as my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) has set out. Education leading to work provides a route out of poverty. However, for some children, the effect of being born into poverty will already be apparent when they start school. That is why early interventions in a child's health and development are crucial. I again pay tribute to the work on this matter done not only by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, but by the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen).
	It is disgraceful that the Government have cut the number of health visitors by 2,000 over the past four years. Health visitors give families the support and advice that can help children to secure a good start in life. We would increase their numbers by more than 4,000, guaranteeing a minimum of six hours of health visitor support in the home for all families during the first two weeks of a child's life. There is no magic solution, but we must consider such policies if we are to reverse the increases in child poverty that we have seen in recent years.

Yvette Cooper: The right hon. Lady has spoken about the importance of the early years. Can she confirm that she proposes to cut the Sure Start programme?

Theresa May: That is a myth that the Labour Government have attempted to perpetuate for many years. We have not said that we will cut the Sure Start programme.
	Numerous elements must be considered as part of a broad, holistic approach to child poverty-debt, addictions, health care, housing and the criminal justice system-and we will press the Government on those issues during the remaining stages of the Bill's passage. It would be a wasted opportunity if they ignored them.
	The Bill must mark a second phase in our nation's progress towards ending child poverty. The first phase was simply not good enough. It was a one-dimensional approach that focused solely on tax credits and, tragically but predictably, resulted in an increase in child poverty at the very time when it should be decreasing. The same mistake must not be made again. Poverty is a complex and stubborn blight on our nation, and we will not eliminate it until we recognise its causes and tackle them head on. That means supporting the family as the most important institution in our society. It means tackling generational worklessness and welfare dependency. It means ending the failures of our education system, which result in so much wasted talent. It means working with local government, businesses and the voluntary sector in all parts of the country.
	The Government's intention in presenting the Bill now is to bind the next Conservative Government. I assure the Minister and the House that the next Conservative Government will not adopt a one-dimensional approach to child and family poverty. We will recognise, and seek to tackle, the complex web of issues that lead to it, as part of our aim to improve the well-being and life chances of all those living in the United Kingdom.

Jamie Reed: I think that I speak for everyone when I say how dismayed I am by the hollow and poor understanding, the poor grasp of the facts, and the real lack of compassion displayed by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May).
	I have spoken in the Chamber many times about matters of importance to me and to my constituents. I have spoken about matters of national and international importance, and about the policy solutions required if we are to succeed in those areas. Sometimes I have spoken about my role as an individual, and the roles that my constituents have played, not only in helping to solve the problems but, on some occasions, in causing them. With that last element particularly in mind, if we are truly to understand and defeat child poverty each and every adult in the country must understand the part that we have played in helping to create it.
	It is a matter of fact that in the world's fourth largest economy, at the beginning of the 21st century, the existence of poverty-and child poverty in particular-shames us all. We in this country pride ourselves on our liberal democracy, our values, our national character and much else. Too often, however, we retreat into those comfort zones, satisfied with what we have achieved, satisfied with what we stand for, and satisfied with ourselves. Because the challenges that face us as individuals and as legislators are often relentless, there is an understandable desire in some quarters to take flight from the front line on occasion, and to take stock and repair before entering the fray anew. I entirely understand that attitude, but I reject it, because it has burdened the fight against child poverty. In our towns and villages, in the cities, in the countryside, in our streets, in our state schools and hospitals and elsewhere, it has blighted our efforts.
	Each and every one of us in the House should be plagued by the presence of child poverty in our country of wealth and abundance. It should haunt our sleep and terrorise our waking moments, because child poverty is not a choice, and nowhere in the country is it inexorable or unavoidable. Child poverty is a consequence of our actions. It is an illustration of our failings, and for members of my party its defeat is a cause worth devoting the rest of our lives to. However, in doing so, we must remember that the longer it takes to defeat child poverty, the harder victory will become.
	I welcome the Bill. It is clearly necessary, and no other party could or would have introduced such legislation. The Government's record since 1997 in taking 500,000 children out of poverty-now they are on the way to taking another 500,000 children out of it-is a worthy one of which we can all be proud.

Graham Stuart: I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could tell us whether he believes that the number of children in severe poverty has increased or decreased since the Labour Government came to power.

Jamie Reed: I understand that the definition of severe poverty has been roundly condemned by the agencies most concerned about the alleviation of child poverty in this country. It is seen as something of a smokescreen put up by a party that, sadly, refuses to support the very measure that has taken so many children out of poverty.

Karen Buck: I am interested in that question. Is not it the case that the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Child Poverty Action Group estimate that, if the definition of severe poverty now being promoted by the Conservative party were applied to its record in government, severe poverty would have increased by 500 per cent. during those 18 years?

Jamie Reed: My hon. Friend makes a compelling point. That is absolutely right.
	The lives of the children we have lifted from poverty are not simply lives transformed; in many cases, they are literally lives saved. Our actions have undoubtedly prevented significant cases of poverty, including child poverty, across the board. There should be pride in that-but while one British child still languishes in poverty, there can be no satisfaction.

John Mason: I note that the hon. Gentleman has used the words defeat child poverty before, and he is talking now about one child being left in poverty, so I wonder whether he is satisfied with the idea of 10 per cent. being left in poverty. Would that be counted as eradication?

Jamie Reed: The measures in the Bill are the most unprecedented steps towards defeating child poverty in this country ever-but, for me as an individual, no I am not satisfied. However, without measures such as the minimum wage, the new deal, Sure Start centres and much else, the incidence of child poverty would be much greater. We should judge colleagues in the House on their actions, not their words. Their voting record tells us all that we need to know about that.
	The truth is that we should have done more. Surely we all accept that, but by creating a statutory duty for child poverty to be effectively defeated by 2020, the Government deserve great credit. It is a bold step. I welcome it, but urge that the date be brought forward. Is it the unintentional consequence of the Bill to allow a child born today not to enjoy that right-that is what it will become under law: a right for children-until they are 11? That cannot be right. Perhaps the Minister can inform the House why 2020 has been chosen, what the next 11 years will look like, and how any potential change of Government would affect the fulfilment of that statutory obligation. Children's charities are very concerned about such a prospect.
	Can we also have a guarantee that the fight against child poverty will be properly resourced, irrespective of the broader economic outlook? I ask those questions because the House is very good at listening to those with a voice-victims of collapsed financial schemes, of industrial injuries and of other serious injustices-and we are always adept at listening to the media. We are adept at listening to the taxpayer and we are able to discern special interest groups when we hear them, all in the knowledge that those voices have votes.
	Poor children cannot vote. Their voice is usually a whisper, and evidence suggests that when-sometimes that means if-they reach adulthood, they do not vote at all. Why? Because we consign those people to the under-class-a class of people who are, as the term suggests, outside society and outside the acceptable, without a voice and living in the shadows. The journey from the maternity ward to the shadows of poverty is a quick one, and begins the second a child is born into a family living in poverty, whether their poverty is relative or absolute. I think that we can all take genuine comfort from the fact that the national health service ensures that all our children are born equal, but that equality withers the instant a child leaves hospital.
	This summer, I will hold a child poverty conference in my constituency. That will bring together local Sure Start centres, voluntary providers of child services, local government, social services, GPs, schools, businesses and Churches. The aim of that group will be to identify the child poverty in my constituency, its scope, location and nature, and then to develop a plan to beat it. Fundamentally, the aim is to defeat child poverty in my constituency well before 2020. It has to be this way, and I urge other hon. Members to do the same.
	The battle against child poverty must be fought locally; it cannot be fought solely on a national basis. There is little prospect of a lever being pulled in Whitehall that will have an instantaneous effect in my constituency. We need soft influence as well as hard influence-carrots and sticks.
	On soft influence, which the Secretary of State has already mentioned, I return to remarks I made at the beginning of my speech about individuals helping in their own way to create child poverty. Individuals do help to create child poverty; we in this Chamber help to do so in our communities, by ignoring both its causes and its signs. For us truly to succeed, this has to change. As significant as this legislation is, better central policy alone is not enough. More behavioural and cultural change is needed on the part of all of us if we are to prevail.
	It is not just the job of the teacher to identify those children in their classroom who are living in poverty. It is not just the role of the Department for Work and Pensions to identify imperilled families. That is also about the local priest who looks after an impoverished parish yet rarely sees the poor among her congregation. It is about the local councillor who sees poverty on his streets and does not shake his council into action. It is about the shopkeeper who knows he should not sell alcohol and tobacco to under-age children but turns a blind eye. It is about the police officer who picks up the same kids from the same estates for the same reasons time and again. It is about the Member of Parliament who has no affinity with his constituency, does not see the impoverished children in his area, and is either too detached, too distracted or too uninterested to solve the problem. It is about the neighbour who does not lend a hand. In short, it is about each and every one of us. We must accept that child poverty is our problem, not someone else's.

Gary Streeter: The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech, which I am appreciating, but in his long list of people for whom child poverty is an issue he has not yet mentioned parents. There should be more in this Bill about the important role played by parents in the early years of a child's upbringing. Will he come on to talk about that?

Jamie Reed: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and he pre-empts my next sentence. By hard influence, I mean precisely parents and the encouragement of self-reliance where there is none to be found.
	This is why community efforts are so vital. Whitehall cannot provide the full arsenal that communities need to defeat poverty, because most men and women in Whitehall have probably never seen child poverty.

John Howell: The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting point, with which I happen to agree: a lot of the effort should be local rather than central. However, why then does he agree with a Bill that is so rigid in its central planning diktat for local government?

Jamie Reed: Because we have a fundamental difference of understanding in respect of the Bill's scope, provisions and aims. I think it is a very enabling Bill, which allows people to provide the solutions that they see as being the most appropriate for their own communities.
	I have talked about community efforts and the good men and women of Whitehall not having actually seen poverty. Most areas will be different, and in any event child poverty will not be beaten between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday to Friday. With this in mind, I particularly welcome provisions in clause 8 of the Bill, where the Secretary of State must consider what action is necessary, with regard to the employment of parents and the provision of financial support for families, and in health, education, social services, housing, the environment and other policy areas, to ensure that the fight against child poverty succeeds.
	That cross-departmental approach is essential if we are to succeed. However, I know that such collegiate working can be very difficult, and for this co-ordination to be truly effective it will have to be done in Cabinet and enforced at the highest level. Will the Government ensure that the permanent secretaries of various Departments are as seized as they are of the importance of this agenda?
	I also welcome the emphasis placed on local authorities. Independence is important, but will the Secretary of State provide more information regarding discretion among local authorities? Will the Government also ensure that local authorities prioritise need above other considerations? I would hope that they would.

Graham Stuart: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Jamie Reed: I have been more than generous in giving way, and I must now make some progress.

Mark Durkan: rose-

Jamie Reed: My apologies to my hon. Friend, too, for not giving way.
	Will the Government also ensure that the innovation, energy and insight of the third sector are put at the forefront of our efforts? In my experience, the flexibility of the voluntary sector can often-not always, but often-lead to more successful and productive outcomes than when statutory bodies pursue similar aims.
	Tackling child poverty must be among the most important public spending priorities. The budgets relating to that policy agenda must be ring-fenced and, as a bold extension to that, we should further incentivise the benefits of employment for the poorest families in our society by taking them out of the taxation system altogether until they no longer live in poverty of any kind, be it relative or absolute. Finally, will the Government consider establishing pilot projects with the aim of defeating child poverty in discrete identified areas well before the 2020 deadline? I volunteer my constituency for such a pilot, and I look forward to the Government's response.
	This Bill is precisely what my party, and this Government, are for. I commend Ministers and the Prime Minister for what has been achieved so far, but I urge them to be even bolder by bringing the target date of 2020 forward. Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of putting a man on the moon, but let us never forget that that feat was not the inevitable consequence of a pressing industrial or scientific need; it was the result of a political choice. Kennedy famously stated:
	We choose to go to the moon.
	A combination of sufficient resources and political determination made it possible. Politics is about priorities and choices. The fact that 40 years after conquering the moon we should still be discussing the spectre of child poverty is a sickening tragedy and a savage indictment of our society, so let us choose to do more. Let us choose to defeat child poverty and to do so before 2020.

Steve Webb: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed), who reminds us, in this discussion of statistics and targets, about the human face of child poverty and the fact that tackling child poverty is a cause, not simply yet another benchmark, target or box-ticking exercise. His perspective is very welcome and his commitment to action in his constituency is impressive.
	I welcome the Bill. I sometimes tend to be slightly churlish in response to Government Bills, but I unreservedly welcome the fact that this one contains a commitment to tackling child poverty. At Prime Minister's questions last week, the Prime Minister talked about abolishing child poverty. I think that the House would recognise that that is not what this Bill sets as its target; it sets a target of having fewer than 10 per cent. of children living in relative poverty-by my maths, that still works out as 1 million children. The common understanding among the public of abolishing child poverty would not be that 1 million children are left in poverty. I hope that the Government and the Ministers present today will reflect on how they describe this Bill, because there is a danger of a noble end being oversold-Governments of all sides have a tendency to do that. If the aim is presented as the abolition of child poverty and a future Government subsequently pat themselves on the back because only 1 million children are in poverty, the public would be justified in thinking that that was not quite what they had in mind. I hope that Ministers will be more realistic about what this Government seek to achieve through the Bill, but I welcome an objective of this sort and a process for monitoring progress towards it.

Graham Stuart: I agree with the point that the hon. Gentleman has just made, which is all the more right because in a number of countries, including Denmark, the level of child poverty is below 5 per cent. Thus, to suggest that the eradication of child poverty should involve a figure of 10 per cent. is at least slightly misleading.

Steve Webb: It is certainly true that the UK has a very poor record on child poverty compared with most of the rest of the European Union, and I shall discuss that later. Our record has got progressively worse over the past 20 to 30 years, although at least some welcome efforts have been made to reverse the situation in the past decade or so. The extent of child poverty in this country is internationally embarrassing.
	I hope that the House will forgive me for being autobiographical for a moment-I am not referring to my own poor childhood, but to my career prior to coming into this House. My first job was working at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose work has been cited on a number of occasions during this debate. In the nine years I was there, my entire research was on poverty and child poverty, and the measurement of it. Although I was working for an avowedly non-party political think-tank-I had to leave it when I was selected as a parliamentary candidate to help preserve its party political neutrality-monitoring povertyunder the previous Conservative Government during the late 1980s and early 1990s was, over many years, a profoundly politicising piece of work. I say that because we would update the figures each year, check the relevant Department's figures and monitor trends in child poverty and find that year after year the level of child poverty would remorselessly grow. A majority of people would do relatively well, enjoying tax cuts, and the people at the top would do exceptionally well, but year after year more and more children would find themselves in poverty.
	One of the things that caused me to cease being an even-handed academic and to want to engage in the political process was the fact that I was appalled at what was happening in our country to the most vulnerable people. Some people did very well in the late 1980s, but children in poverty did not. Therefore, this is a Bill that could never have been brought forward by a Conservative Government, because they stood idly by and watched child poverty reach record levels. To hear Conservative Front Benchers suggest that they even care about this subject, and that it would be some sort of priority, is frankly unbelievable.
	People are judged by what they do when they have the chance to do something, and, in 18 years, there was at best benign neglect and, in some cases, policies that actively made matters worse. We have heard of the freezing of child benefit, and I would add to the list the abolition of grants for essential items for lone parents on benefit, and their replacement with repayable loans from the social fund, which had to be paid back out of inadequate benefits. Under those reforms, people could get to the point at which they were too poor to qualify even for a loan. The Conservative party said that poor families were getting too much help through the grant system, and replaced it with repayable loans that had a threshold that meant that people could be too poor to be entitled to help. That is what happens when the Conservatives' priorities are put into practice.
	That is one reason why I welcome the framework of this Bill, the 2020 target and the commission. There has been a spurious suggestion that there will be a vast, sprawling quango that will rob the public purse of money. In fact, the estimated cost of this new body is £20,000 for a dozen people to come together four times a year to discuss the issue, with two civil servants working on it. In the context of one of the biggest social problems of our age, that is a tiny amount of money. If this is one of the quangos that the shadow Secretary of State suggests would be abolished by a new Conservative Government, I would like to know what she would put in its place.

Andrew Selous: The hon. Gentleman has launched a withering attack on my party. As a former statistician, he will be aware that the current figure for children in poverty is 23 per cent. I have looked back at the figures, and it has been around the 23 per cent. figure for the past 30 years. It has gone up and down around that figure- [ Interruption. ] If the hon. Gentleman and Ministers look at the figures, they will see that the figure of 23 per cent. has occurred fairly regularly over the past 20 to 30 years. Why does he think that there has not been a big improvement in the last 12 years?

Steve Webb: My recollection of the years I spent looking at those figures is very different. In the late 1980s, when there was public money to spare, it was spent on cutting the standard rate of income tax. Indeed, it was even spent on cutting the top rate from 60 per cent. to 40 per cent. That is where that Government spent money when they had money. Within a year or two of those tax changes, they also froze child benefit. The priority of dealing with child poverty was certainly not borne out in practice.
	The policy of the Conservative Government in office was to link benefits for children to the retail prices index. At a time of economic growth, that link means that relative poverty rates will rise remorselessly over the long term, year in and year out. We can argue about the efficiency of the delivery mechanism when it comes to tax credits, but the amounts that have gone into them have been a substantial increase over the RPI-a marked difference to what we saw under the Conservatives.

Graham Stuart: Will the hon. Gentleman accept that child poverty rates have not fallen significantly under this Government and that employment is the biggest single influence in getting children out of poverty? It was employment that the last Conservative Government prioritised. There was no indifference or lack of care. To suggest that Conservative Members do not care about child poverty is a gross distortion and an untruth, and I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw that remark.

Steve Webb: I seem to recall that when Mrs. Thatcher came to power, unemployment was slightly over 1 million, and it reached 3 million within two years. It was still 3 million in the mid-1980s and that had a devastating impact on child poverty. This issue is cyclical, but the Government have clear control over the underlying policy, such as benefit rates. If benefit rates are price-indexed over a period of decades, people on benefits are cut adrift. At the time, that was explicit Government policy, because the argument was that people would be motivated to seek work if life on benefits was made very difficult for them. That was Government policy for decades, and I do not approve of it.

John Mason: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that getting parents into employment does not automatically mean that children are not in poverty? Many children in poverty now are in families with at least one parent working, and that would be made worse if there were no minimum wage-which the Conservative party does not really support.

Steve Webb: The hon. Gentleman is right that there is substantial in-work poverty. The role of the minimum wage, however, is less clear-cut. I support the minimum wage, but many of those on it are young people, so the link between it and households in poverty is not as close as one might imagine, although it is part of the overall picture.

John Battle: I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for sticking with this issue since 1980s, paying close attention to the figures and having a clear analysis. Some of us were working on poverty in charities and non-governmental organisations at the time. Does he agree that perhaps the language that we have used has been wrong? We have looked at poverty as though there are puddles of poverty that can be mopped up here and there, when in fact we face deep, entrenched and endemic poverty that has a multitude of causes. We need long-term, patient and serious attention paid locally to those challenges.

Steve Webb: The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that poverty has many facets. One of the welcome aspects of the Bill is that rather than pick a single point of a graph and say, That is poverty, but that is not, it measures poverty in various ways, including material deprivation and persistent poverty.
	My hunch is that the Government have made a rod for their own back with this Bill. They have set four targets. The absolute poverty target is a waste of time. It will just enable the Government to pat themselves on the back-if they cannot reach the poverty target for 10 years ago, we are really in trouble and might as well all go home. The target on persistent poverty, however, will be a nightmare, as will the one on material deprivation. Therefore, it is entirely laudable that the Government have included those targets in the Bill, and I welcome that.

Gary Streeter: I respect the hon. Gentleman's expertise in this matter, and I shall therefore ask him a genuine question removed from the party political issues. Does he think that it is possible for a family living wholly on benefits to be living above the poverty line?

Steve Webb: That is a central question in this debate. If there is a goal to abolish child poverty in a meaningful sense, and benefit levels are below 60 per cent. of median, some families will always be in child poverty. Even with the most benign economic environment, significant numbers of families will probably always be on benefit. Ministers will have more accurate figures, but I suspect that the benefit level for an unemployed family with two children is not far off the 60 per cent. line. It is not implausible to think that people on basic benefit levels are just out of income poverty. The assumption that people would be in income poverty by being on benefit troubles me, and it should relate to the definition of the adequacy of benefits. I hope that the Minister will be able to give a more precise answer to that question than I can.
	Britain's historic record, especially in the 1980s, was shocking, but where we are now is very worrying. In the European context, we are better only than Italy, Poland and Romania. All the other 25 EU countries have lower child poverty rates than we do. The goal of being about as good as the best European countries is a start, but it should not be the end of our ambitions.
	One of my greatest concerns is that an opportunity has been missed in the last 12 years. If we have made so little progress when the economy was doing relatively well, it will get much harder in several respects. Presumably, the first to be taken out of poverty are the low-hanging fruit-those who are only a few percentage points below the line, who are temporarily on a low income, who will find another job or who are poor for a simple, single reason rather than complex and multiple reasons. Relatively speaking, it is cheap and easy to take such people out of poverty. If we are behind schedule in the good times, what will be different about the years to 2020 that mean that we will not only catch up but accelerate our progress? If we could not achieve the goal when we had the political will and the money in the bank, when the public finances looked relatively good and the economy was growing-if all we could do was tackle the low-hanging fruit and even be behind schedule on that-is it credible that we will accelerate progress and tackle the most difficult cases when the public finances are crippled? It is an admirable goal, but do the Government believe that we will achieve it? If they do, why have we gone so slowly relative to what we need to do, given that we have been going only for the low-hanging fruit?
	The needs of children in poverty are complex and the policies for tackling them will be expensive; for example, complex issues arise for children in families with disabilities or for children living in care. My understanding is that children in care do not count in the figures because they do not live in households, and surveys are based on households. I have no idea what the number of children in care is, although I ought to know-[Hon. Members: Sixty thousand.] Although there are 60,000 children living in care, could we declare the problem of child poverty solved because the children are not in the survey? Is there some way of grafting them on? I appreciate that mixing and matching is tricky, but it would be an omission if we excluded children living in local authority care.
	Children in homeless households probably do not find their way into the surveys. In theory, a household survey can pick up a homeless household, but if people are in temporary accommodation or transient, or if they moved out between the time the survey application comes and the interviewer turns up, they would at the very least be under-represented. Might not a whole set of vulnerable children be missing from the survey? Can the Government think of a better way of including them because they are very important?

Sally Keeble: The hon. Gentleman might also want to take into account the fact that Traveller children and the children of asylum seekers are not included, which is a major point.

Steve Webb: Obviously, a lot will depend on the exact methodology of the survey. There are permanent local authority Traveller sites in my constituency where the residents are on the electoral register, so they would be included, but I accept the general point. The hon. Lady is right: there is a risk that some of the most vulnerable children would be under-represented.
	As I think has already been pointed out in the debate, the issue is not just about cash, but dealing with financial hardship and pressures on families will certainly help. That is one of the causative factors in family breakdown-to return to the point made by the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) about the impact of family breakdown. When people go to bed every night worried about paying the bills, relationships come under pressure. Tackling that problem might be one of the most practical things we could do to support couples in staying together. The hon. Gentleman suggested that we put something about marriage or parents in the Bill. I am not sure that we need to write anything explicitly in the Bill-that we need to legislate-but there are a lot of policies that might address that point, en route to delivering the child poverty goal.
	In the big picture, we have not so far dwelt enough on the get-out clause: clause 15. I do not think the shadow Secretary of State mentioned it-probably because she hopes to invoke it. The idea that the Government might say, Well, child poverty is terrible, but we are broke, really would cause fundamental doubt about the whole Bill.

Mark Harper: We are broke.

Steve Webb: But is the Conservative party committed to the Bill or not? We know the state of the public finances, so we risk doing a disservice to our electors if we sign up to a Bill and then all quietly go off saying, Of course, none of us thinks it will ever be implemented because we're broke. If that is how we view the Bill, we should come clean. As the hon. Member for Copeland said, it is a question of priorities. We will be spending money on some things over the coming years and child poverty clearly needs to be a priority.
	The Liberal Democrats have argued that we should be prioritising within existing budgets; for example, rather than paying tax credits right up the income scale, we could reallocate some of the money to lower income families. That would assist in meeting the child poverty goal.
	I have one or two more points about measuring child poverty. Happily, we have the whole summer for the Financial Secretary to reflect on all the points I am making-I know he is pleased about that. When he and the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), gave evidence to the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the issue of disabled people on disability living allowance was raised. The point was made that if two people-for example, the Financial Secretary and me-were on identical wages, but I was disabled and receiving DLA and had matching costs, the official methodology would say that I was better off than him because my income was higher. However, my costs would be higher. One option is not to include DLA and then we would be the same-as we should be; but the Minister said that as the DLA is income, it has to be counted. That may be so, but another way addressing the issue is through the equivalence scale.
	The equivalence scale takes otherwise different households and converts them to a common denominator. Families with extra children have extra needs, so there is an extra factor in the equivalence scale. Why not include a factor for disability in the scale? We can look at the spending patterns of households where someone has a disability, just as we have looked at households with children, and exactly the same method that was used to derive the Maclennan equivalence scale could be used for a scale that reflects disability. We would thus have a truer impression of child poverty in households where an adult is disabled. It might take many years of research to sort that out, but the question needs to be addressed, because I believe that the official figures understate poverty in disabled households. They must do so, because they add an income that is only to meet costs; it is money that goes in and goes out again. It does not make the household better off net than if it was a non-disabled household, but treats it as such. I hope the Minister will look at that issue.
	We talked briefly about omissions from the survey data, but some groups are under-reported, such as children from minority ethnic groups where poverty rates are higher. Among white children, the figure is about 20 per cent; it is 42 per cent. among Asian British children, and 31 per cent. for black British children. On average, children from minority ethnic groups are more likely to be in poverty, but they are less likely to be in the surveys, because we know that the household surveys on which the statistics are based tend, for various reasons, to under-represent urban areas and people from minority ethnic groups. The surveys are grossed up to population figures to correct for biases in age, sex and marital status, but not, as far as I am aware, in ethnicity. There is a limit to how far we can go down that route, but my worry is that the official figures under-state poverty, because such groups are under-represented in the surveys and that is not corrected when the data are scaled up to population estimates. Will the Minister look at that point?
	In Committee, we shall have many happy hours looking at the detail of the reports. Modesty forbids me from commending various papers that the Minister might like to read over the summer; no doubt, we shall come back to them in the autumn. Stepping back from the minutiae, it is good to have a Bill of this sort. It is 10 years since the then Prime Minister said that we must abolish child poverty in a generation. A child born the day after he said that is now more than halfway through their childhood. As the hon. Member for Copeland said, there is a real worry about urgency, although given that we are behind schedule, even 2020 looks a bit ambitious from where I stand. The worry is that whole generations may go by, so we need an enforcement mechanism.
	In response to the Work and Pensions Committee, Ministers said that the Bill states only that Ministers have to have regard to the economic situation in designing their programme. That looks like a get-out clause to me. I would like clause 15 to be taken out of the Bill, because the goal should be tackling child poverty. Of course Ministers will have regard to the economic situation-they always do and they always should-but why do we need that clause in this Bill? It has the feel of a get-out clause and I hope the Government will reflect on that.
	When the Government introduced the Climate Change Bill, they had an ambitious goal for a long-term problem and they set up the Committee on Climate Change to oversee and monitor its enforcement. There is recognition of the fact that the public do not trust us when we say, Vote for us and we'll fix the problem in 20 years' time. We need a mechanism to monitor progress-to chivvy and cajole. The child poverty commission is, if anything, quite clearly under-resourced. If we want it to report to the House on the failure of any successive Government to achieve progress on child poverty, it needs more teeth and more resources. If the commission is to meet only four times a year and be serviced by only two civil servants, will it really have the needling role that the Committee on Climate Change has? We need that for the child poverty commission too. MPs come and MPs go, and people move from portfolio to portfolio, so we need a body whose role in life is to chivvy whichever Government are in power to make sure that we make progress towards a noble aim that will be incredibly difficult to achieve.

Karen Buck: I start by emphasising an element of consensus that has emerged from the speeches that we have heard so far: that the Bill is, broadly speaking, a good thing; that establishing a target in statute is, broadly speaking, a good thing; and that targets alone do nothing to put money in the hands of children who need it, so what matters is what we do to reach the targets rather than the targets themselves. The Secretary of State gave us a compelling reason for reminding ourselves of that-the human dimension of child poverty-when she gave the example of a child who received nothing for his birthday. That is a common experience for children living in extremely low-income families. They will actively avoid other people's birthday parties. Many times I have found that children simply do not respond to an invitation because of their parents' fear that they will not be able to take a present with them.
	For the many of us who are parents, this is the first day of the school holidays, and it is worth reminding ourselves exactly what poverty will mean for children who are looking at a six-week stretch without the resources to participate in activities that are regarded as the norm and on offer in the community. We know that one definition of a family on a very low income is of a child of 16 living in a household where the total gross disposable income is £100 a week or less. It costs £9 for a child of 16 to go to a cinema in my constituency, so a family would be looking at spending 10 per cent. of their income on one trip to a cinema. To attend a sports camp, such as a tennis coaching camp, in a local park would cost nearly half the family's income, so the children simply do not take part.
	It is no surprise then that we see a tendency for some children from particularly poor families to find themselves in trouble-bored, at a loose end and drifting into antisocial behaviour. When the norm is to participate, and some children are not able to do so, the situation is very difficult. One element of poverty about which we always have to remind ourselves is what the costs of living actually are. Poverty is not just a matter of how much money is coming into the household; it is about what demands are placed on families and their children and their ability to fund those commitments.
	That is as far as the consensus goes. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who said a great deal with which I agree and who has a long track record of displaying knowledge and expertise on this issue. We heard a speech from the spokesperson for the official Opposition that I found profoundly depressing in many respects. The first element that depressed me was the fact that there was no recognition whatever that tough though progress has been to achieve-I shall turn later to some of the problems of maintaining that progress-a great deal has been done. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) was extremely negative-indeed, damning-about the Government's record, and drew on some quotes to illustrate her argument. However, we should also consider what has been said by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others.
	Donald Hirsch's report, What is needed to end child poverty in 2020? says:
	Over the last few years a significant reduction in child poverty has been achieved, backed by significant resources.
	Similarly, the poverty and inequality official report, published in February by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, says:
	There is no simple picture of success or failure...trends have improved in more policy areas than they have worsened in...Notable successes in the last decade included...reduced child and pensioner poverty; improved educational attainment for the poorest areas and schools; and a narrowing of economic and other divides between deprived and other areas.
	It is extremely worrying that we are not able to begin a critique of what needs to be done and why progress has stalled in the past couple of years without at least an honest and mature recognition of what has been achieved. When the official Opposition speak-this also came through in interventions-they totally ignore not just some of the progress but the substantive work that the Government have done over the past dozen years to tackle the complex causes of poverty. One has only to look at the annual Opportunity for all reports and all the documentation produced by the social exclusion unit to see the enormous amount of research and thinking that went into examining the complex drivers of poverty, including family breakdown and, of course, worklessness, and establishing the importance of early intervention.
	It is utterly dishonest to claim that the Government have driven an entirely statist agenda on poverty without working in partnership with voluntary and community organisations. That is simply nonsense, and if that is the Opposition's intellectual level, it bodes very ill. There are plenty of criticisms that can be made of the Government, and plenty of anxieties that can be expressed about where we go from here, but there is a vibrant partnership with voluntary and community organisations at both a local and a national level. I look at my own constituency and see a range of organisations that are working in partnership, such as Sure Start and its children's centres as well as those that are involved in relationship counselling and those that work with children. Westminster Children's Society is our main partner in delivering child care, and Women Like Us works on outreach for parental employment. I point the right hon. Member for Maidenhead towards that kind of work, and ask her to rethink the sterility of the Opposition's position.

Jamie Reed: Does my hon. Friend share my view that the contribution made from the Opposition Front Bench was more like a crazed attempt to force people into marriage than a meaningful attempt to assault child poverty?

Karen Buck: I do not think that anyone sensible could doubt that growing up in a stable relationship gives a child the best possible start in life. However, I do wonder, given the push towards marriage being reasserted by those on the Opposition Benches, why, when they were in government, they scaled down the married person's tax allowance to the point of its virtual disappearance. There is a little hypocrisy in their position. We want to promote stable relationships, and marriage is obviously a critical, but not the only, way of providing a child with a stable life. We need, above all, as the Government have done-and as, in practice, the Opposition were moving towards-to direct resources towards the child rather than worry too much about the exact status of the relationship in which the child is growing up.
	I want to lay to rest some myths, the first of which is the idea that one can tackle child poverty without money. Its causes are complex and multifaceted, and we need to look at education, relationships and so forth to deal with them, but we will lift people out of poverty by making sure that they have more money. It is a no-brainer, but unfortunately I hear the Conservative party propagating the myth that we can tackle child poverty without money.
	It is extremely worrying that we believe that simply driving parents into employment without ensuring that that work pays will somehow tackle poverty-it will not. It will simply move a parent from out-of-work poverty to in-work poverty, and quite possibly deepen their poverty because of the costs that they will have to deal with.
	There is also the myth that we can achieve everything that we want to achieve through local delivery rather than with national Government. Ending child poverty is a national Government responsibility. It requires the active participation of local authorities, but I say to Conservative Members that it is striking that my local authority, a flagship Conservative-controlled authority, did not mention the word poverty for 11 and a half years, until the Government offered it some money to deliver pilot work on reducing child poverty, whereupon it took the money and is now, I have to say, doing some very solid work on it. However, it has taken-and will continue to take-national direction to deliver that work.
	Having defended the Government from what is an admittedly reasonably easy target-the official Opposition -I must say that it is a grave disappointment that we have flatlined following the progress made between 1999 and 2006, with even a slight deterioration in the situation recently, despite the welcome addition of around £2 billion of extra investment in the 2006-07 Budgets, some of which is still to come through. We have an interim target for 2010, which we will clearly not reach, but there is no reason for not recommitting ourselves to reaching it as soon as possible: the fact that we will not hit the target in 2010 does not mean that we cannot hit it in 2011.
	We do not want a target for 2020 to take total precedence over interim measures. Similar concerns were raised in relation to the Climate Change Act 2008 about not allowing long-term perfection to drive out the messier and less perfect but none the less very important interim objectives.
	My right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary has done a great deal on this issue in his ministerial capacity and he knows that London is at the heart of much of our dilemma in reaching the child poverty objective. London has not made progress-in fact, if London had made the same progress as the rest of the country has, we would be hitting our lone parent employment targets and would be well on the way to hitting our child poverty target. London's experience has clearly demonstrated that incentives work in getting parents into employment and helping them to earn money and lift themselves above the poverty target.
	Incentives have worked in every other part of the country. The tax credit system has delivered lone parent employment levels and reduced child poverty, but it has not worked in London. Why not? Work incentives, as delivered through the tax credit system, do not deliver in London because our costs are so much higher. We pretty well know what works. The London child poverty commission does not have a huge intellectual task ahead of it. We know what works: incentives into employment work, as does the delivery of affordable, quality child care. Again, it is a no-brainer. The problem is not about thinking up new ideas, but about delivering on them. That cannot be done for free, despite the assumptions made by the Opposition.
	I want to finish by spending a minute or two on something about which we did not hear much from Ministers but about which I would like to hear more in the winding-up speech and in Committee. None of us has done a terribly good job at convincing the public of the need to tackle child poverty. The most fascinating Joseph Rowntree Foundation report-it is also the one that deserves the closest scrutiny by Ministers-is the one that looks at attitudes to child poverty. There is a general assumption among the public that the word poverty is associated with individual failure and, effectively, laziness. In part, that is obviously to do with the abstraction of the word poverty, which people do not like, but when they are confronted with it as a concept, there is a general willingness to believe that people are the architects of their own inadequacy and poverty.
	In large part, that is explained by the low awareness in the public mind of such elements as average income. I do not know whether any hon. Member in the Chamber has ever taken it, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies has a test on its website that asks people to place themselves on an income scale. I am sure that all hon. Members know only too well where they are on the income scale, but most people phenomenally underestimate where they stand on the scale-the IFS has applied the test to groups of civil servants in particular. Most people think that they are average earners, but actually-oh boy-we are not. We are very high earners indeed, while the overwhelming majority of people who take the test find that they are much higher on the income scale than they expected.
	People do not understand just how low the incomes that people on low incomes are, nor do they fully understand, when they are earning, just how low benefits are. Above all, they do not understand-this point was made in an earlier intervention-that half of all households in poverty contain at least one person who is in work. As long as we have a public assumption that poverty is associated with out-of-work benefit-dependency, we will have our work cut out in winning public support for what needs to be done.
	Does it matter whether we have public support? It matters hugely, because we have a moral commitment-I would say that we all have that commitment, in all parts of the House-not to leave children behind in this, the fourth largest economy in the world. It also matters a great deal whether we have public support because poverty costs this country a great deal. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the cost to the British economy of maintaining high levels of child poverty is around £25 billion, while 1 to 1.8 per cent. of GDP could be saved by lifting children out of poverty. There is therefore a powerful economic case. I am sure that hon. Members in all parts of the House would accept that long-term poverty and inequality not only are an economic drag on this country, but take their toll on the wider economy and society.

Gary Streeter: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), who made a thoughtful and passionate speech, and with whom I enjoy serving on the Select Committee on Home Affairs. I am used to her intellectual analysis, and we have seen some of that this afternoon.
	We all want to eradicate or severely reduce child poverty. There is much in the Bill that we can all support, and we wish it well. We hope that it works. Whichever Government oversee its implementation, we very much hope that child poverty in this country will be reduced. However, I would like to make a few comments, and I hope that the Financial Secretary, who is a very reasonable man, may take some of them on board and seek to improve the Bill as it goes through Committee, although sadly I shall be supporting him only from a distance in that process.
	I want first to explore the issue of targets. It seems to be becoming quite a fashionable framework for the Government to impose a target and then set up a commission to monitor it-we have seen that primarily with climate change. One of the problems with targets is that they can be a distortion. We asked the Home Secretary about targets when he appeared before the Home Affairs Committee last week. The police now have only one target, which is public confidence. A couple of years ago, however, they had dozens of targets. There is now a recognition that targets can sometimes be a distortion.
	Targets can also be a disappointment. Perhaps the most famous set of targets in the world are the millennium development goals, according to which we will do tremendous things by 2015, but sadly-tragically-it looks as though we will not hit those targets or anything like them by 2015. I just hope that we have not set people up for a huge disappointment, which will not help the implementation of policy.
	I therefore worry slightly about the Government just saying, Here's the target and this is a solution. A target is not a substitute for a plan and a strategy. I would like to see a little more depth to the Government's plan and strategy in the Bill. A target can give us the impression that we are doing something, when in fact all we are doing is creating a target. As for the commission that will oversee that target, I wish it luck; but as we have heard today, it will not be significantly resourced, so I wonder what contribution it will make.
	We must not forget that a recent UN report concluded that the children growing up in the UK right now are some of the unhappiest in the whole of Europe. Why is that? The answer is not just about pounds, shillings and pence-that point is the missing ingredient in the Bill and in this debate, although it has been reflected slightly in some of the interventions. How many ways are there of raising children out of poverty? We can increase benefits significantly-we had an exchange about that earlier, although I do not pretend to be an expert on the benefits system; I will leave that to the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who certainly is an expert on it-but the call on the Exchequer will be dramatic.
	We know that we can improve access to employment, which is a significant way of helping children and families get out of poverty, and I frequently ask myself how we go about that when I encounter poverty in my constituency surgeries. It was rather unkind of an earlier speaker to suggest that Conservative Members do not understand or encounter poverty; we all encounter poverty in our daily lives and in our constituency business. Access to employment is critical, but we must wonder how much there will be over the next few years when we are caught up this serious recession, with private sector unemployment still rising and possibly public sector jobs being lost in the next five years, whoever wins the next general election.
	So we can increase benefits and improve access to employment, but a third thing that we can focus on-it is not tackled in the Bill-is improving the stability of the framework in which children grow up. The Bill is primarily about financial poverty, but children suffer all kinds of poverty-it is not just about pounds, shillings and pence. The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North made an important point about children who cannot afford to go to the cinema, go on a family trip or go out with their friends. I accept that those are serious impediments, but children are also poor in terms of encouragement, stability, a nurturing environment, and a framework of values in which they can grow and succeed. It is not about single parents-it is about households of chaos, as I tend to call them, and broken families. How many children grow up in households of chaos where they do not enjoy a sense of security and stability and tend to go from pillar to post? That is one of the greatest factors in the creation of poverty. There is not much about that in the Bill, and that worries me.
	There is a missed opportunity in clause 8(5). In considering and measuring how we are making progress on child poverty, if we are to take into account education, health and housing-all very sensible-why on earth should we not take into account the frameworks of stability and security in which children are growing up? That is a key factor. I recognise that there is no magic wand to create those frameworks. However, I hope that when the Committee considers the Bill line by line, it will at least debate that, and perhaps add the requirement that we should take into account the stability and security that can breed the nurturing environment and freedom from poverty that we want for all our children. Of course the Bill is well meaning, but it slightly misses the point about the cause of poverty for too many children-it would be better if it said a little about stability and family breakdown.
	I strongly support the policy advocated by my Front-Bench colleagues on putting a form of stability back into the tax system. I am modern enough to accept that not everybody is going to get married. I happen to be married, as are many people in this Chamber. The statistics tell us that marriage creates a form of stability that no other union or relationship has known in the past or is likely to know in future. However, I recognise that lots of people do not want to get married-that is fine. I am interested not so much in marriage as in promoting stability for our young children. I think that marriage is the most important vehicle for stability; none the less, I want those who choose another way of life to enjoy a stable relationship, at least while their children are growing up.
	I am probably pulling the rug from under my feet by asking how we can achieve that in relation to non-married couples, which is a tricky thing to do. I see that the hon. Member for Northavon is thinking of intervening on me-I hope that he will stay in his seat, because I do not have an easy answer. However, at least we can make a start with the significant number of people who choose to be married. If we had a tax system that favoured marriage, or at least did away with the penalty on couples, that could give a wider choice to people who have chosen not to get married, and who could then opt into that system. Although we cannot pass a Bill to create stability, we could nudge people by sending a strong signal that we want to underpin stability for families; that would create the right mood music.
	I want to see much more early intervention in the lives of children who are clearly in difficulty-not only those who are at risk but those who are in danger of growing up under-achieving and in poverty. The idea that has come from Conservative Front Benchers about equipping and deploying an army of district nurses would be the right way forward. Having experienced, practical people going into the home, seeing what is going on, being able to give advice and acting as a gateway to other advisers would be a useful tool for underpinning stability and early intervention for children who are in danger of falling into poverty and the kind of under-achievement that we see all too frequently.
	We talk about these difficult-to-achieve issues to do with creating stability, supporting parents and early intervention, but we do not expect the civil service to do that as it cannot easily be done by the state. The Bill is oddly and disappointingly silent about harnessing the resources of the voluntary and charitable sectors. I am not saying that they can solve every ill-of course they cannot-but there is a vast reservoir of good will and a vast army of people who can supply some of the advice, wisdom, time and support that so many of these families and parents are struggling to find.
	I welcome the provision on local authorities and their delivery partners, but the situation as regards outcomes is very patchy around the country. Many local authorities are not good at giving leadership to the voluntary and charitable sectors in their communities and ensuring that there is better co-ordination. We need to improve the situation-the Bill does not do so-and I hope that that can be done in Committee. Why is the voluntary sector able to succeed more than the civil service-more than paid employees or the state-in supporting parents and families who are struggling? It is a question of motivation, of time, and of being able to give a personal, one-on-one commitment to seeing a problem through. That is what many people need. The voluntary sector can help with that, and we need to be a lot better at harnessing it.
	We need to include in that the faith communities, whichever faith might be involved. We must be a lot better at deciding what faith communities can do, what they cannot do, and what we want them to do. Of course, no one wants to see them proselytising at the expense of the public purse-that is completely wrong. On the other hand, we do not want to intervene in charitable works with a spiritual component that are undertaken by faith communities, and try to squeeze the life out of them. We cannot say, Oh yes, that works-we'd like you to do more of it, please, but here's a set of rules we want you to follow that will mean that you won't be getting the same results as previously. This must be based on results. We must monitor what the voluntary sector is doing and vet it with a light touch-it must comply with professional standards-but we must not put it in a straitjacket that squeezes the life out of its performance. It has a huge part to play in supporting and underpinning families and children, and I wish that the Bill did more to encourage that-it is another wasted opportunity.
	I am nervous about the setting up of another quango. I have heard that it is not one of the most expensive, but even appointing such independent people would be an expensive process in itself.
	There is a grievous omission in the Bill as regards children in care-60,000 youngsters who are surely the poorest of the poor, in view of all the opportunities that have been denied them after their removal from their families, for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Now that we are talking about child poverty, is it not time for a major push in trying to intervene more effectively in the lives of children in care, particularly when so many of them leave care aged 16 and go into a vacuum? I ask the Minister to reflect on that.

Stephen Timms: rose-

Gary Streeter: Of course I give way to the respected Minister.

Stephen Timms: I hope that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that clause 8(2)(b) refers to all children. The difficulty, though, is in defining what is meant by a child in care being below the poverty line-that is a measurement that cannot be addressed in the Bill. I agree, however, that we need to ensure that children in care, children in Traveller families and others benefit from the improvements that it sets out.

Gary Streeter: The Minister makes a good point. Perhaps that is one reason why the definition of poverty-although I know that the Bill focuses primarily on financial poverty-should at least give credence to other forms of poverty, which would make things easier. The one thing that I would like the Government to do for children in care, which could easily be done through this Bill, is to ensure that they have proper back-up when they leave care. A lot of them go into a vacuum. A social worker might contact them once in a blue moon-we know how busy they are-and many of these children end up on the streets as the poorest of the poor.
	This has been a very interesting debate. Some people say that in modern-day politics there is no difference between the main parties. I think that debates such as this show that there is a difference still between the main parties, and I think that it is a healthy difference. One of the differences that I would see is that the Government are still intent on a top-down solution-if I might say so, a rather bureaucratic, pounds shillings and pence solution-whereas I would like to think that the Opposition are looking at this issue in its proper context. We see that child poverty is at least in part a reflection on the family breakdown that we are seeing in our country, so sadly, at this time. We know that to tackle this problem properly is not just a matter of introducing a new bureaucratic system, a set of targets or a new commission; it is about rolling up our sleeves and grappling with the difficulty of trying to foster security and stability once again for families in this country so that children can grow up to achieve their full potential.

Julie Morgan: This has been an important and interesting debate. Child poverty is one of the most important issues that the Government are tackling. I strongly support the Bill and congratulate the Government on the steps that they have taken so far and on having the courage to go for these ambitious targets. Indeed, that is a great tribute to what they have already done.
	I want to start by paying tribute to all the organisations that have worked in this field and contributed to the debate about child poverty, in Wales in particular. I want to pay special tribute to Save the Children, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Bevan Foundation, which is a Welsh think-tank, and in particular to the pamphlet written by Victoria Winckler that I shall use in this brief speech.
	I am chair of the all-party children in Wales group. I am pleased that its vice-chair, the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Davies), is also here. The group has worked very closely with the voluntary agencies involved in tackling child poverty. The importance of the voluntary sector's role has already been made clear. I want to emphasise that point. Before I came to this place, I worked for Barnardo's; I worked with many children who were growing up in deprived circumstances. Having a Government who are trying to address those issues is a huge step forward.
	The all-party group recently visited a family centre in Pontlottyn run by Action for Children. The centre is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Havard). We saw at first hand the huge efforts made by voluntary organisations in helping young, vulnerable families, many living in poverty, to get some of the stability that the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) mentioned. It is important to recognise that this Government and the Government in Wales have worked very closely with the voluntary sector, and that tackling the lack of stability in some families is something that the voluntary sector does extremely well. One of the main reasons why it can do so is that voluntary sector groups can get closer to the families than statutory agencies can. It is well recognised, including by the statutory agencies, that that is one of the strengths of the voluntary sector. It can be more innovative and can work with less threat to the families. That work is going on, and it has been encouraged by the Government. Tackling the lack of stability that we know exists in many vulnerable families has been a big plank of the Government's programme throughout the UK and certainly in Wales.
	One of the interesting things that the all-party group found was that this group of young families-mainly young mothers with children-felt that one of the barriers that brought them into poverty was the lack of affordable transport in their area. That illustrates the fact that the debate about poverty is multifaceted. We cannot restrict it to one particular area, as it covers all areas. The other issue that those families spoke very strongly about was the lack of affordable child care.
	Recent reports have suggested that 32 per cent. of children in Wales-192,000 children-live in poverty. We all agree that, as has been said widely here today, for any child to live in poverty is a slur on what we are doing in this country. In addition, Save the Children says that more than one in 10 children live in severe poverty. When we look at the households that those children come from, we can see why they live in poverty. The reasons have all been mentioned today.
	The Joseph Rowntree Foundation notes that 60 per cent. of Welsh children who live in poverty live in a workless household and that 40 per cent. live in a lone-parent household. Some 40 per cent. of children who live with a disabled parent are in poverty, compared with 25 per cent. of those whose parents are not disabled. We have already heard about issues concerning children living in households where one of the parents has a disability.
	Such figures are not any great surprise, really. Poor children come from households where there are disabled people, from single parent households and from workless households. What are the consequences of this poverty? In Welsh schools with a high number of low-income families, 27 per cent. of children fail to get five GCSEs, as opposed to 5 per cent. in more prosperous areas. The chances of poverty being perpetuated continue. We all know the phenomenon of families where poverty is passed from generation to generation. It is important that we use every means at our disposal to try to tackle that link between one generation and the next. We need to use every means to do that and the targets proposed in the Bill are one such means.
	The Bill is certainly not narrow in the way that the Opposition have suggested. We have only to consider clause 8 and the measures involved to see that the Bill is trying to tackle poverty in its widest aspects. By failing to support children from poor backgrounds at an early age, we risk not only building up huge financial bills for the future, but having to live with the disappointment of children who do not fulfil their potential. Children being disappointed, and at a very early age, is one of the saddest situations we can see.
	I was very moved by the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) about children who cannot go to birthday parties because they cannot afford to buy the present and card. When we think about what many of us have done with our own children-about how much it costs to ensure that they have a card and a present, and about the fact that in some schools there may be a party every week, especially if there are 30 children in a class, with the whole class sometimes being invited-we can see what a huge financial burden is involved. It is very distressing to think of a child's being aware, deep down, that they cannot take part in the activities that other children can take part in. That is a huge motivating factor in respect of the strength of the Bill. It is the sort of reason why the Bill is so important.
	There are many ways of tackling poverty. Children's inability to take part in some activities can be tackled by trying to make provision more universally available. For example, we can provide free access to swimming and leisure centres. That has been the policy in Wales for under-16s for some time, and I believe that it is being extended to the rest of the UK.
	On another important point, it is good that the Government have recognised how important it is to work on child poverty with the devolved countries by developing a strategy and working at a local level, particularly with local authorities. I know that some aspects apply only to England, but I hope that they will also apply to Wales in the future.
	Eradicating child poverty by 2020 is a huge aim, which we all support. However, we must also provide increased opportunities by making things more accessible, including mainstream services. The Welsh Assembly Government have their own child poverty strategy and will introduce the Children and Families (Wales) Measure. It is vital that the poverty strategies of the UK and of the devolved bodies are co-ordinated, and that links between them are strong.
	Wales has taken particular initiatives to tackle poverty through education, with policies such as Flying Start and Foundation Phase Wales, which is based on the Scandinavian model of children learning to play at an early age. It has been phenomenally successful in the early years of its introduction. Wales has also provided for free breakfast clubs for any school that is happy to introduce them. Again, that will add to the proposals in the Bill. Those initiatives will have long-term benefits in tackling poverty, but obviously we deal with many of the key income-related issues, such as taxation and benefits and welfare-to-work, here in Westminster. It is essential that UK and Welsh policies, and those of other devolved Administrations, together tackle child poverty throughout the UK.
	Given that 60 per cent. of children in poverty in Wales are in workless households, work on access and encouragement is essential, and Department for Work and Pensions initiatives are important. The system of providing advisers is excellent and I have had good feedback, particularly from lone parents who have been helped by the lone parent advisers. We must always remember that such work has to be accompanied by adequate, affordable child care and good public transport. The Government have made many strides in child care, but a shortage of provision remains-certainly in Wales, although the Flying Start initiative is helping to move things along. I cannot yet say that there is universal, affordable child care. Like the Government, I see work as the way out of poverty, but to give everybody work opportunities, we must make proper child care provision.
	Flexibility is also important. Work must be flexible so that parents and children benefit from being with each other as well as having the income that work provides. Above all, benefits and allowances should encourage, not discourage parents' employment.
	Child poverty must therefore be tackled in many different ways, and it is great that the UK strategy, as described in clause 8, ensures that the Secretary of State must promote employment, financial support, health, education and social services, housing and social inclusion. That gives the lie to the Opposition's comments.

Graham Stuart: Those are just warm words in clause 8. They are not a strategy. The Bill simply states that we must have good education and good conditions; it covers a variety of matters, but in no way adds up to a strategy. Indeed, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said that the policy on fighting poverty for the past 10 years is now exhausted. We need a new one, but it is not in the Bill.

Julie Morgan: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I think that the Bill amounts to much more than targets.

Karen Buck: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's critique of the poverty strategy is that its heavy dependence on work incentives, driven through the tax credits system, is not sufficient to enable the Government to reach the child poverty targets. That dependence is necessary but insufficient, so the critique means almost the opposite of what the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) implies.

Julie Morgan: I agree, and I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution.
	I strongly welcome the child poverty commission and was surprised that the Opposition criticised it. The commission is important because it will unite the whole UK in planning a strategy. It is important that the three devolved Administrations appoint members and that they are closely bound to it. The commission should operate as independently as possible. Some charities have suggested that it should be able to commission its own research. I hope that the Financial Secretary will comment on that when he replies to the debate.
	Ending child poverty must mean ending poverty for every child in the UK, but some of our strategies do not reach every child. For example, in Wales, some strategies are based on locality, yet very poor children may live in more prosperous areas. I want to refer to two disadvantaged groups, which have already been mentioned in the debate. The first is the Gypsy and Traveller community, for whom there is not enough accommodation to bring up all children safely and healthily. The health statistics for Gypsy mothers and children are shocking. I want to ensure that any debate about child poverty and any targets will include children from that disadvantaged background. The second group is asylum seeker children, who are treated differently from other children in this country. They are very disadvantaged in many ways-for example, in income and access to services. Every child is a child, and I hope that any poverty strategies that arise from the Bill will take account of those two disadvantaged groups.

John Howell: I echo what has been said about the importance of this subject, and the need to tackle child poverty, but I have concerns about the approach in the Bill. I shall start with the implications for local government. The Bill lays a duty on local government to devise a local strategy to reduce or mitigate child poverty. My first disappointment is that although that hints at wider definitions of child poverty in broader socio-economic terms, when one follows through its logic, it clearly boils down to the same income-related criteria as in the rest of the measure.
	My second disappointment is that the approach to local government is typical of the Government's treatment of that sector in the past 12 years. This is yet another example of local government being Whitehall's delivery arm, and of much of the initiative being taken away. We should not do that, because local councils' ability to tackle child poverty more broadly gives initiatives local colour.
	My county council fully understands what it means to break the cycle of deprivation, and what that cycle is. It is prepared to deal with a combination of linked factors, including employment, poor skills, low income, poor housing, crime, poor health and poor access to services. It is already doing that in partnership with the county voluntary sector development partnership, the children and young people partnership, the health and well-being partnership, the county safer communities partnership, the economy partnership, the environment partnership and the district local strategic partnership. What added value does the Bill give to the positive work that is already happening?
	Is there not a risk that the Bill could divert attention from the carefully worked-out strategies that have already been put in place with other organisations to meet Government targets? Many hon. Members may, like me this morning, have received a brochure in the post illustrating a range of local government activity in connection with child support. It shows that not only is my county council taking a lead in seriously tackling the problem, but that there are examples throughout the country of councils of all colours that have already accepted that as a duty.
	The one-dimensional approach to local government is now beyond a joke. It boils down to, If in doubt, lay another prescriptive duty on local government. It is an extremely cynical approach, because ultimately it puts the duty on others, so that if it fails, it is not the Government's fault. Local government does not need more centrally driven strategies, assessments, detailed regulation and guidance from the Secretary of State. It is not surprising that one of the biggest factors prompting local councillors to stand down at the last county council elections was that they felt that responsibility and accountability for shaping their own environment had been taken away from them.
	The Bill gives no idea about how the changes will be resourced. I am extremely worried about its mention of the possibility of creating pooled budgets, because that rather suggests to me that it is simply about recycling existing money. We have to ask what will have to go from the strategies already in place, because local government money is finite, and decreasing.
	My own council's opinion is that the Bill will mean a huge realignment of funding and services and a change to orientation on a geographical basis, with a move away from what it is currently doing. I believe that there is a much better way, which would genuinely bring out the benefits of localism and move away from Government-imposed targets and directives. There is no real sense in the Bill of partnership between local and central Government, because ultimately there is no partnership between the two, and there has been very little for the past 12 years. We are a million miles away from the type of compact with local government that hon. Members from north of the border say the Scottish Government have.

John Mason: indicated assent.

John Howell: The hon. Gentleman nods, and I well remember his comments on this subject in the Committee on the Equality Bill, on which we both served.
	We can see from the list of partnerships that I read out, each of which has its own strategy, that we now have strategy overload. As my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) said, the Bill sets out a bureaucratic model-but a model that contains no real idea of sustainability. I dread announcements being made about pilots when a Bill is introduced, because the usual approach is short-term pilots with over-investment followed by long-term under-investment in the roll-out, so that expectations are dashed.
	I am not the only one who sees the importance of the shift that is taking place. Barnardo's admits that the Bill
	shifts significant responsibility for the eradication of child poverty onto local authorities and their partners.
	It is concerned that in the absence of additional resources from Government, the ability to drive progress will be limited. Concern has also been expressed by the Child Poverty Action Group that there is no idea of how the Bill will work in practice. It, too, asks what will have to be dropped from existing strategies in order to deliver the changes.
	The Bill represents the wrong way of working with local government, and it echoes what we came across in debates on the Equality Bill. In the fifth sitting of the Public Bill Committee, on 11 June, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper) said:
	if we put responsibilities on a range of authorities...we must think about not only the duties that we are placing on them, but the resources that we grant them. If we place a lot of responsibilities on public authorities without the concomitant resources, we may be setting up not only Ministers, but that significant list of authorities, to fail.
	We argued that direct interference from central Government in defining what should go into sustainable community strategies, around which that Bill was based, was wrong. My hon. Friend said:
	It is for electors to make decisions when they elect different members of those authorities and it is for those authorities to make the decisions in debate, weighing up all the factors concerned. It is proper for that to be done at that level and not for Ministers to seek to put duties on them. --[ Official Report, Equality Public Bill Committee, 11 June 2009; c. 127.]
	I urge Ministers to acknowledge the good work of many local authorities across the country and embrace a broader-based partnership approach to them. I urge them to back off from central Government planning and let local authorities choose the indicators and targets most appropriate to their own area when they produce their strategies.
	I also have a couple of comments about targets. The Bill seems to be an admission of failure, as we have already heard that by 2010 we will be 600,000 short of the target. The Financial Secretary is a man who likes to put a good spin on things, and I notice that he has talked about the glass being half full, or indeed two-thirds full, when it is really a third empty. That spin undermines the effect of the target. In the Select Committee proceedings that have been referred to, he admitted, in answer to question 3,
	given current economic circumstances, that it will now be hard to meet the 2010 target on time.
	That is true, but it is interesting that he went on to say that nobody could have foreseen
	the scale of the current economic crisis.
	That is believable only of someone who was blinded by the myth that they had abolished boom and bust.
	I felt excited when I saw the aim in the Bill of ensuring
	that children...do not experience socio-economic disadvantage,
	because it could widen the scope of the Bill to encompass a range of non-income factors, which a number of hon. Members have mentioned. That hope was dashed by the fact that the only measurable things in the Bill are income targets. That distorts the policy agenda hugely, detracting from factors such as education, social work, good parenting and others that have been mentioned. It is a one-dimensional approach. If there is a legislative target for income and not for other factors, there is surely likely to be a bias in the allocation of scarce resources. That, too, echoes debates on the Equality Bill, which followed the same line on socio-economic duty and the concept of disadvantage.
	There are some anomalies in the calculation of income. The targets in the Bill all relate to the income of qualifying households, rather than to the income of children. The modified OECD equivalence scale that the Government currently use, which has been mentioned, allocates a weight of 0.67 to a household's first adult, before housing cost income, a weight of 0.33 to subsequent adults and children of 14 and over, and a weight of 0.2 to children under 14. If the Government transfer income to a household of two parents and a young child in pursuit of their targets, 83 per cent. of the income transferred is therefore assumed to be spent by, and for the benefit of, the parents. Only 17 per cent. is assumed to be spent on the child.
	Such a transfer may be the only way of helping the child, and I am not criticising that method of approaching child poverty, but we need to be clear about who the chief beneficiaries of the targets will be. In reporting on what has been done for such households, the Government should simultaneously report on what has happened to poverty elsewhere, even if they do not have targets for it.
	Conventional income measures ignore income in kind, such as the provision of free education and health care, and the effect of indirect taxes. However, as we have heard, they include disability living allowance, even though that is arguably provided to accommodate the extra costs of disability and should not be counted as income. There is a great need to increase the take-up of benefits and to simplify the whole system. Both those matters were brought up in discussions with the Financial Secretary in the Work and Pensions Committee.
	Comparisons have been made with the Climate Change Act 2008. I shall not go into the merits of that Act, but there are two reasons why the procedure of setting long-term targets was more appropriate in that case. There was a need to provide long-term certainty about the British Government's intentions, to encourage private sector development of costly technology and to strengthen the UK's position in international negotiations. By contrast, this Bill merely defines a framework for Government reference. Whereas the Climate Change Act included new powers to help achieve the targets set out-on emissions trading schemes, biofuels and household waste, for instance-this Bill contains no new powers other than those affecting internal Government processes.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) was being generous when she suggested her new title for the Bill. If the title really reflected the contents, it would be A Bill to set targets relating to the eradication of poverty in households with children, and to make other provisions about child poverty. That would be a far more accurate title, even if it tripped off the tongue less easily; it reflects the bureaucratic nature of the Bill. The problem is multifaceted; it needs a multifaceted solution, and the flexibility to ensure that we can make a real difference to the lives of children in poverty in this country.

Mark Durkan: I support the Bill. As a number of hon. Members have said, child poverty should concentrate all minds in the House, and more widely in politics. To their credit, the Government have, down the years, successfully addressed child poverty through a number of measures, both budgetary and other. It is appropriate that they see fit to try to reinforce further their commitment on child poverty through appropriate legislation, so I welcome the Bill.
	Unfortunately, I do not completely welcome the tone taken by the Secretary of State in opening the debate. An issue of such worth should not be the subject of as partisan an excursion as the one to which we were treated. Child poverty is a serious and compelling issue, and cutting the debate down to the goading and needling of the Opposition is unworthy of the purposes claimed for the Bill.
	Like other Members, I am interested in a number of the issues provided for in the Bill. However, unlike some of them, I would like the Bill to go further, and I shall give an example. Several Members have referred to the importance of the child poverty commission. The hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) talked about the commission ensuring that there was a combined UK strategy, but I am not sure that the provisions in the Bill will allow the commission to do that adequately. Clause 7 sets up the commission. It is significant that three of its six subsections, taking up four lines, deal with setting it up; the other three subsections, covering 11 lines, deal with the possibility of the Secretary of State winding it up. Provisions elsewhere in the Bill require Ministers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to have a role in appointing people to the commission, and in providing advice and contributions, but there seems to be no provision for them to have any role in relation to any determination by a Secretary of State to wind the commission up, which seems rather strange.
	Under clause 9 subsections (1) and (2), the commission is to provide advice at the request of the Secretary of State, and according to a timetable set by the Secretary of State. In subsequent subsections of that clause, we are told that the Secretary of State will
	consult such children, or organisations working with or representing children, as the Secretary of State thinks fit.
	I hope that the Government will clarify whether they foresee the commission being able to engage in such contact and consideration; that would meet the point that hon. Members made earlier about the need for the commission to recognise the worth of advice, and the relevance of the role of a number of charities and voluntary organisations, and some faith-based groups.
	I hope that the Government will clarify, in the winding-up speech tonight and certainly in Committee and on Report, whether the provisions that address aspects of devolved responsibility will be fine-tuned, so that we end up with strategies that are compatible, complementary and coherent. At the moment, there are provisions in clauses 10 and 11 on the Scottish and Northern Ireland strategies respectively. Clause 11 says that strategies in Northern Ireland
	may not include proposals that relate to excepted or reserved matters, within the meaning of the Northern Ireland Act 1998.
	Clause 10 contains a similar provision relating to the relevant Scottish Act. I can understand what is meant, but we need to ensure that strategies produced by the devolved authorities can make proper and appropriate reference to UK Government measures and relevant initiatives. In quite a number of policy areas, we are in a twilight zone between devolved responsibility and reserved or excepted matters.
	Clause 8(5) says:
	In preparing a UK strategy, the Secretary of State must consider what (if any) measures ought to be taken in each of the following areas-
	(a) the promotion and facilitation of the employment of parents or of the development of the skills of parents,
	(b) the provision of financial support for children and parents,
	(c) health, education and social services, and
	(d) housing, the built or natural environment and the promotion of social inclusion.
	In each of those areas, we can identify where there are clear devolved remits, but we can also identify where there are significant UK Government influences, contexts and parameters. In a sense, if we are honest, there are a number of matters that are nominally in the area of devolved responsibility, but on which the devolved Assembly in Northern Ireland is basically engaged in making karaoke legislation. The Assembly often has to frame its legislation according to limits, constraints and frameworks determined here in Westminster and Whitehall. We need to ensure that the Bill does not unduly cramp the style of the devolved authorities or their initiative in coming forward with realistic relevant strategies honestly set in the context in which Administrations and societies finds themselves.
	As well as the numerous references in the Bill to the role of the devolved authorities, there are, as a number of hon. Members have said, significant references to local authorities, specifically in England and Wales. In Northern Ireland there is change in local government; the new councils there will have some responsibilities for community planning and general well-being. Obviously, I hope that the omission of any reference to local government in Northern Ireland does not mean that local councils in Northern Ireland will be precluded, under the legislation, from making contributions to the task of eradicating child poverty.
	It is significant that while there are copious references to local authorities and various partnerships that might be involved, and while there are many references to devolved authorities, the only references to Whitehall are to the Secretary of State-and, it seems, to just the one Secretary of State. We are left with the question: will this legislation be binding everywhere in the country, except across Whitehall? The hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) made the point that men and women in Whitehall do not experience or meet child poverty every day, but they very much set the context in which child poverty exists and continues, and where it can be alleviated and, hopefully, eradicated.
	Clause 8(5) refers to the UK strategy and to what the Secretary of State must consider; again, it is the Secretary of State who is to consider the measures. The provisions do not, as hon. Members have suggested, bind the Cabinet or Cabinet Sub-Committees to addressing that range of measures.

Graham Stuart: I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman is as confused as I am by the Bill. My understanding was that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families headed up the whole area of children, and that he-or possibly she, in future-would co-ordinate such matters, yet the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is leading on the Bill. That perhaps suggests that the approach will not be as holistic as one might have hoped.

Mark Durkan: I accept the hon. Gentleman's point. The question arises: under the Bill, where does the Secretary of State's responsibility lie, not just in the Government's intention, but in the intention of any future Government? That is an issue against which we have to test the worth and strength of the Bill.
	If we are to get the coherent, joined-up approach that Ministers are clearly saying that they want to achieve, the Bill will need tweaking and fine-tuning in a number of respects. It is significant that many of this Government's achievements on child poverty relate strongly to budgetary measures that were taken in various Budgets and through the Treasury. It is also significant that, while the Bill requires an annual statement to be made by the Secretary of State, it contains no obligation for Budgets or comprehensive spending reviews directly and specifically to address the issue of child poverty.
	It should be noted that, just this year, the Treasury Select Committee regretted the fact that neither the pre-Budget report last autumn nor the Budget statement this year specifically addressed the issue of child poverty. The Committee noted that that was a significant omission, even allowing for all the other pressures and distractions that exist. Before we can convince ourselves that we are passing a Bill that will actually mean something in terms of committing the Government and this House to eradicating child poverty, we must acknowledge that the Bill is silent on the matter of budgetary statements. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is obliged to produce many statements and reports on many issues that set out many different factors and assumptions, and it seems odd that we should pass a Child Poverty Bill that would allow a Chancellor to produce significant Budget statements without at least addressing issues of child poverty and identifying the terms and assumptions involved.

Sally Keeble: As a member of the Treasury Select Committee, may I say that although no specific measures were announced in the most recent statement, one of the most significant measures to tackle child poverty-which is about increasing housing benefit and council tax benefit-will come into effect this autumn, and that it was pre-announced quite some time ago?

Mark Durkan: I fully accept that point. Nevertheless, the Treasury Committee clearly lamented the fact that there were no references to child poverty in the pre-Budget report or the Budget statement. I shall not read out the entire quote from the Committee, but it called on the Government to address that matter in the future.
	The proposal to eradicate child poverty raises the question of what we mean by eradication. Other hon. Members have already said that the Government have set a target that seems to suggest that a poverty rate of anything below one in 10 could count as eradication. Such a percentage in this House would equate to 64 Members, but I see an Opposition party here with more than 60 Members that does not regard itself as eradicated. Under 10 per cent. hardly counts as eradication.
	Regrettably, that proposal is an example of the Government and the Department for Work and Pensions resiling from an understanding that they gave in 2003 on eradicating child poverty. Their document, Measuring Child Poverty stated:
	Success in eradicating poverty could, then, be interpreted as having a material deprivation child poverty rate that approached zero and being among the best in Europe on relative low incomes.
	However, what we are legislating for here falls short of that standard set by the DWP, and I hope that the Department and the Government will return to the prospectus that they were offering in 2003. I hope that the Bill can be improved as it continues its passage through the House.
	Another way in which we could usefully improve people's understanding of the purpose of the Bill is to show real parliamentary intent. At a time when the reputation of Parliament is pretty low and when politics is not held in the highest esteem, if we are going to legislate on child poverty, let us set down the clear principles that we as a Parliament want to address. The commission envisaged in the Bill will clearly have an important role, as will the Secretary of State, in providing reports to Parliament, but perhaps we in this House-or a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament-should actively monitor the progress of the provisions. We should be tracking and backing the targets, and testing them, rather than simply waiting to pounce on the annual reports from the Secretary of State.
	Perhaps such a Committee could follow the style of the Joint Committee on Human Rights-not meeting as often as a regular Select Committee-in probing and testing some of these issues. That could include highlighting good practice, because we shall be imposing a number of obligations on central and local government, and on devolved Government. If we are obliging them to report, we, as the Parliament that created the legislation, should at least pick up the information in order to establish best practice and to reinforce and support the people who are delivering on the targets.

Graham Stuart: I wonder whether the public would have more confidence in the measures if the commission were to report to Parliament rather than to the Secretary of State. Perhaps the Select Committee could play a role in the appointment of the chairman of the commission. If Parliament were to hold the Secretary of State to account, people might have more faith that the outcomes could be achieved.

Mark Durkan: I fully accept the hon. Gentleman's point, which reinforces the one that I was making. People would value Parliament making serious commitments about what it was going to undertake, rather than our imposing what appear to be obligations on central Government that leave a lot of room for central Government to pass them down to others while abdicating from them themselves.
	Clause 15 gives serious cause for concern in relation to a future Government being able to avoid some of the requirements in the Bill. Its provisions on economic and fiscal circumstances could be played like a joker by any future Government who wanted to say, No, there are measures that we cannot consider because the prevailing economic and fiscal circumstances mean that we cannot proceed or act on child poverty. People will not accept such excuses and slippage. They will identify such slippage as slipperiness. If they see us building a get-out clause into the Bill, they will think that it can be cited, by virtue of other prevailing circumstances, as a way by which the provisions will not make as robust a commitment to eradicating child poverty as they need to.
	I support the commitment to eradicating child poverty by 2020. In Ireland, however, my party has strongly argued that 2016-the 100th anniversary of the proclamation of Irish independence and of the Republic, which set out the key element of cherishing all the children of the nation equally-should have been the date by which we should have eradicated child poverty there. Obviously that has not happened, however. This Government have made huge strides on this issue. Yes, there have been some blips and slips in recent years, and we understand the circumstances involved, but we welcome the fact that the Government are showing the resolve and determination to legislate for this. I hope, however, that they will recognise that the Bill can, and must, be improved as it proceeds.

John Barrett: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). He said that this should not be a partisan debate. Apart from some of the usual political banter earlier in the day, I think that Members on both sides of the House have treated this as a serious issue on which we want to move forward. Unfortunately, however, the Bill is very much about setting targets rather than delivering an end to child poverty.
	A few Members have talked about the great progress that has already been made, but we are where we are, and, in regard to where we stand in Europe, that is not a great place to be. My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) mentioned that child poverty rates in the UK were below those of Poland, Italy and Romania. I do not have his encyclopaedic knowledge-which he gained from working for the Institute for Fiscal Studies for nine years-but I think that it is worth putting on record which European countries we are behind in this regard. We are behind Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Cyprus, Iceland, Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belgium, Estonia, Malta, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Lithuania, Greece and Spain. So, when people say that we have made great strides in years gone by, we must remember that we are still not where we want to be.
	I see pockets of poverty in my constituency, which is generally viewed, like those of many other Members, as a relatively wealthy one. It is sad to say that in my eight years as a Member, nobody has ever come to my surgery to ask about child poverty. People come along to say that they have problems with their benefits, tax credits or whatever, but nobody has told me, You must deal with the issues of child poverty. It is the same with housing problems in that very few come along to say, Housing is a major problem and we want to see Parliament do something to sort out the wider problem.
	As I have said, the Bill deals with targets, but there is a great shortage of specific detail and no specific strategy. As the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) said, it is very easy to set targets for issues such as the millennium development goals. We all heard pledges made when the G8 met at Gleneagles a number of years ago. Earlier this year, the G8 met again in Italy and some of those who had made significant pledges at Gleneagles were there calling for action to happen, but those very same people had not delivered on their own pledges. We must expect promises to be kept generally, but for those suffering from poverty, those promises can be the very heart of their lives.
	People often say that it is not just a question of money or cash in pockets, as there are many other aspects to living in poverty. One particular issue that I want to highlight today is that Government targets on child poverty will never be achieved without a specific focus on disability. I am going to come back to that. There are a wide range of issues involved, but I shall try not to repeat those previously mentioned.
	As a number of Members have said, education also has a key role in pulling people out of poverty. There are two spirals that work with education-an upward and a downward spiral. People who have good jobs and a good income often see their children having a good education. Those children will come out of school, secure a good job and carry on in that upward spiral. At the same time, the children who grow up in poverty often suffer from a poorer education; they will end up in lower-paid jobs and the downward spiral will continue for them.
	Although we have legislation before us-I welcome the fact of this Bill-it will not end child poverty. I accept that some Members care less than others about poverty, but I would like to think that everybody cared about poverty, even though they might not have suffered from it themselves. I do not believe that someone has to rob a bank to know that doing so is wrong. Equally, we do not have to be poor in order to feel the pain of those who are living in deep poverty.
	We see in our surgeries how issues have developed over the years. On the good side, child poverty will be at the heart of every party's manifesto in the run-up to the next general election, which is 12 months away. We have moved on, because child poverty did not merit a mention at all in the Labour party's 1997 manifesto. It was a couple of years later before child poverty came up on the agenda and targets were set, only some of which have been met. The Government have achieved some positive things-tax credits, for example, but there are both good and bad sides to them. There have been errors and reclaims that have caused great confusion.
	Even worse for people, we are now in a recession, with increasing unemployment. Although the Secretary of State announced today a further £10 million to tackle poverty, we have seen tens of billions of pounds pumped into the banking system to ensure that it can carry on working. As we heard in an announcement last week, several thousand bankers received bonuses in excess of £500,000 each, at the same time as many people in the UK were living on the breadline. There is no lack of wealth in this country: if only we could get it right-whether it be through legislation, education, employment, transport, housing or a whole range of other issues-we could tackle the poverty that still exists in too many pockets of the UK.
	A number of provisions in the Bill detail the role of local authorities and devolved Governments and Assemblies. I shall raise one issue, on which I expect the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) to strike back. Problems can be identified at the UK level, as they were some years ago when the UK Government specified that about £300 million needed to be spent in support of disabled children. That went through the Barnett formula, but when £34 million went to the Scottish Government, the money was not spent on that purpose. It was spent on other issues, not on the specific need identified by the UK Government. It is the same with child poverty. There are clear issues that run UK-wide, but when responsibilities are passed to local authorities, Governments and Assemblies, it is sometimes a case of passing the buck, while at other times those bodies just do not deliver. I believe that the responsibility lies at the UK level to see that child poverty is tackled at the UK level.
	I am now going to focus specifically on child poverty in relation to disability. Unless the Bill is disabled-aware, the significant costs associated with living with a disabled child for families and parents who are sometimes themselves disabled will not be understood. So many factors work together that result in children ending up in poverty. It is well known that those who are disabled are less likely to be in work, but more likely to want to work, than their able-bodied counterparts. A household with disabled children will end up with higher weekly running costs-often higher transport costs, sometimes higher food costs because of specific diets that are required and a whole range of other costs. At the same time, however, their income is likely to be lower.
	A few facts are worth reading into the record. One in three of all children living in poverty have at least one disabled parent. A family with one disabled parent is 30 per cent. more likely to be in poverty, and 700,000 children with a disabled parent are living in poverty. Families with disabled children are more than 50 per cent. more likely to be in debt, while 16 per cent. of mothers with disabled children work in comparison with 62 per cent. of mothers with non-disabled children.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon said, there is often a real disparity when extra income or benefits are taken into account. Those increases do not result in those families being better off; they are simply there to deal with the increased costs that the families have to deal with. The Government often respond by saying that they target means-tested benefits to those who are the poorest of the poor, but the poorest of the poor are not necessarily those entitled to and receiving benefits. The real poorest of the poor-this is where poverty is a real problem-are those who are entitled to, but do not receive, those benefits. As I said to the Secretary of State earlier, £10 billion of means-tested benefits went unclaimed this year.

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. May I recommend to him Empowering Society, which was launched today by the Conservative disability group? Its first key idea is that we need to bring in a single assessment for people with disabilities to enable them to access benefits. These people are often sent from pillar to post under the current system and they often end up compromising for the sake of speed-with a reduction in their benefits. What we need to do is radically change that system so that disabled people can get the support they deserve.

John Barrett: I take the hon. Gentleman's point. We often hear, particularly from parents with disabled children, that it is an onerous enough task just to deal with the child and the disability, as it involves dealing with mental anguish as well as the physical disability. Having a disabled child can be the catalyst for family breakdown, which often leads to further social problems. To follow up the hon. Gentleman's point, parents then have to spend hours and hours going from helpline to helpline and from Government Departments to local authority departments and social services, while at the same time having to deal with doctor and hospital appointments. One thing I did to help with this problem at the constituency level was to put together a pack of information for parents of disabled children. The idea was that in their quiet moments, perhaps between their doctor and hospital appointments, they could see at a glance all the help and support that was available to them. Under the current system, whatever the Government's failings, a lot of help and support is available, but people often do not know how to access it, or do not even know it exists. The point is therefore valid, and is not a party political one: all parties in the House would like benefits and support to be received by those who need them most.
	I will put a couple more statistics on the record: parents who have a disabled child are two and a half times more likely not to work more than 16 hours a week; and 10 per cent. of families with disabled children care for more than one disabled child. Although I welcome the Bill, and I leave the exploration of the fine details to the encyclopaedic mind of my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon, Members on both sides of the House can work together in Committee to improve the legislation. In 2009, child poverty ought to be history. Sadly it is not.

Sally Keeble: I am pleased to speak on this important Bill. A number of Opposition Members, especially the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), said that the Bill was an example of interference from central Government, who were constraining and placing more duties on local government. That misses the point of the Bill, as, broadly, it sets out a commitment to end child poverty, with which all Members have said they agree. The Bill sets out some targets-although not enough-to specify poverty, but leaves it to local agencies to deliver strategies to tackle poverty, which is right. Everyone who has worked on poverty understands that it requires local solutions and people and agencies to get into areas of intractable, hard-core poverty, using different strategies to tackle it and considering its specific causes in those areas.
	The Bill is well suited to take forward the fight against poverty. Eradicating child poverty is one of the great goals of this Government. I concede that we will miss the 2010 target, which I very much regret, but we should not ignore the progress that has been made. The Bill will move matters forward, tackling not just the financial aspects of poverty, but the other aspects to which Members have referred. I want to focus on some of those other aspects, and make some proposals to strengthen the Bill.
	Targeted measures, rather than blanket solutions such as general disbursal through child benefit, are necessary to target intractable, hard-core poverty. By and large, we know which families are most at risk of poverty and where they are. As several Members have said, first, they are the families in which no one works. However, the statistics also highlight the risk factors of lone parenthood, disability, unemployment in two-parent households or marginal employment in two-parent households. Those are the biggest risk factors for children to live in poverty and, according to Every Child Matters, for poor outcomes for children. Poor families can also be identified by the state benefits they receive, especially income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit, with disability benefits a bit further down the scale.
	We also know where poor families live, and that has changed over time in an interesting way. In 1970, poor families were most likely to be renting private property, with only a third in social housing. By 2000, the figures were almost exactly reversed, with poor people three times more likely to be social housing tenants. Now, the figures have shifted again. The biggest proportion of poor families are tenants of the state, renting social housing split between council housing and housing association properties. However, the next biggest category of poor people live in owner-occupied housing. The size of that category might increase as a result of the current recession, and the Government might need policy instruments to tackle it.

Steve Webb: The hon. Lady refers to the important role of housing in poverty. She will know that the definition in the Bill explicitly does not take account of housing costs. Given that housing costs might partly reflect quality, but also real inflation, which would in turn affect real living standards, is it not at least a concern that such costs are wholly excluded?

Sally Keeble: I was about to refer to that issue, because housing is one of my main concerns. Before housing costs, 19 per cent. of children live in poverty, but after housing costs that figure rises to 27 per cent. My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) referred to London, and my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will be interested in the figures, as his constituency is also in inner London: after housing costs, 44 per cent. of children in London are in poverty, but before housing costs that figure is about 27 per cent., which is in line with other parts of the country. High housing costs, especially in London, cause poverty. The cost of housing is a significant factor in the poverty of families. Therefore, by increasing housing benefit this autumn, the Government are putting money in exactly the right place. However, they might also have to look closely at the impact of the cost of home ownership on low-income families and on child poverty as a result of the recession.
	The poor are also likely to be in bad-quality, overcrowded housing. According to Shelter, 1 million children are in overcrowded housing, and many more live in homes that are below the decency standard. In my constituency, the number of council properties that fall below the decency standard has risen from 2,698 in 2006 to 4,623 in 2008-an increase from 21 to 37 per cent. That does not take into account the problems with families who are squeezed into unsatisfactory privately rented property, or who struggle to maintain low-cost private ownership. I shall set out proposals to strengthen the Bill with regard to housing.
	The Bill also needs to be strengthened in relation to crime, as the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) suggested. The link between vulnerability and crime is clearly demonstrated in the report by the Prison Reform Trust setting out the proportion of children and young people in custody who have been affected by family breakdown, special needs and poor educational achievement. The Government are studying the origins of that vicious circle in the early years of young people who become offenders, for whom outcomes are disproportionately in poverty. Although the Bill refers to police authorities and youth offending teams as partner authorities, it does not give specific attention to issues in relation to the criminal justice system and poverty, and the implications for child poverty. I would have expected such attention to be given in clause 8 on strategies.
	However, it is more important for the Bill to be strengthened in relation to housing. Every Child Matters, in which the Government's children's policy is rooted, recognised homelessness as the second biggest risk factor for children-second only to low income and parental unemployment in determining a child's success in life. Housing authorities were made part of safeguarding arrangements, and protocols were issued for joint working, although those were weakly enforced. Housing is mentioned as a factor in the Bill, but only in passing in relation to strategies. There are no targets for housing and no indication as to what constitutes adequate housing for a child. In the suite of factors constituting material deprivation, only one relates to housing, which shows a weakness in the thinking behind the Bill. The one housing question is whether there are enough bedrooms for every child aged 10 years or over and of a different gender to have a room of their own. According to the Government's figures, 27 per cent. of those in the lowest decile say that they want but cannot afford that, although most of the rest-70 per cent.-already have it. Given the figures for overcrowding, that surprises me. I wonder what the response would be if those children were then asked whether they had a room of their own only because their parents slept on the floor in the sitting room.
	All the information from every source suggests that inadequate and overcrowded housing plays a major role in the vicious circle that is child poverty. It contributes to poor health-we have seen a 25 per cent. increase in ill health among poorly housed children-and it leads to dysfunctions in families. Homelessness leads to three to four times the number of children with mental health problems. It means that children have nowhere to do their homework. Homeless children miss an estimated quarter of their schooling, and 50 per cent. of young offenders have experienced homelessness.
	I believe that, ultimately, the state is not giving children enough rights to proper housing. Families with children can qualify as homeless, but their rights are circumscribed. It has been said that families with children should not be placed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, but that is only guidance: it does not have the force of law. The standards relating to overcrowding are awful. They were set in 1935, and still provide-except in some pathfinder areas-that two adults, two children and a baby aged under one can be housed in a one-bedroom flat.
	I am sure that other Members can give examples from their constituencies, but I want to give three particularly bad examples from my area, which illustrate the need for housing safeguards for poor families. One of the worst that I have encountered involves a young family. Both parents are unemployed, and the mother has only just turned 21. They live in a small first-floor two-bedroom flat with four children, the eldest just three years old and the youngest newborn. The parents have had a difficult time given their involvement with the criminal justice system, depression, poor health and confusion over their benefits, which resulted in their living on child benefit for about four months before the birth of their fourth baby. A council official who visited after I complained about the family's overcrowding said that there was no problem, because two of the children could sleep in the combined living room and kitchen. Given the safety risks involved in leaving two small children all night in a room with all those household appliances, that was extraordinary.
	The other example involved a grandmother, mother and six children living in a four-bedroom house. They complained that the house was crowded, and that fixtures and fittings were breaking. When I arrived there, I discovered that the grandmother had one small bedroom, the mother had another, the three boys shared one bedroom, and the three girls shared another. The real problem was that the eldest boy was autistic. That returns us to the disability issue. I hope the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) agrees that we should pay attention to conditions involving behavioural as well as physical disabilities. The boy crashed around the house a lot, breaking fixtures including all the doors. More to the point, he spent most of his time pacing up and down the family's only living room.
	One of the material deprivation indicators listed in the Bill is that children are not able to have friends around for tea or a snack once a fortnight. According to the Government, even as many as 61 per cent. of children in the lowest family-income quintile are able to do that. Children can be very cruel about special needs. How on earth could a child feel confident about bringing a friend home from school to tea if an autistic older brother was pacing up and down the family's only living room, and if the child had to share a bedroom with two siblings? How could a child get homework done, or enjoy any peace or privacy?
	A third and perhaps even more shocking case is that of a 19-year-old woman looking after her two young nephews and niece after the children's mother-her sister, a drug addict-had abandoned them. The three children and their aunt, along with the children's dog, were living in a one-bedroom flat. This remarkable young woman said that what really caused her problems was the inappropriate behaviour of the girl because of what she had been exposed to, and that the boy had also been exposed to behaviour that was completely unsuitable for such a young child. The fact that they were short of money was, in a sense, the least of the children's worries. There is poverty in kind as well as in cash. A number of Members have made that point, although I feel that specific targets should be set in the Bill.
	I shall table amendments on the subject of housing. I shall propose a target for clause 3 that, ideally, would be radical, demanding that there should be no bed-and-breakfast provision for children, that all children should have rooms of their own and that every child should have a home with central heating and access to a safe outdoor play area; but that might be too much to ask.
	Perhaps a more reasonable target is that every family with at least one child normally living with them should have a living room-a room that does not count as a bedroom, but in which the family can live and watch television, the children can do their homework, and there is enough space for a table around which they can sit and have a meal together. Another requirement would be that the spatial needs of children with special needs-this raises another point made by the hon. Gentleman-including behavioural difficulties, should be taken into account in the assessment of families' housing needs. If a child has behavioural difficulties, the lives of its siblings should not be turned upside down because of a lack of space in which to cater for its needs. Every child should have housing of a decent standard. As I have said, in Northampton 37.7 per cent. of council housing is not decent.
	One of my predecessors, Margaret Bondfield, who was Member of Parliament for Northampton in 1923, campaigned on women's employment and child poverty issues. The Government's target is to end child poverty by 2020, which, unfortunately, is 100 years too late for my predecessor. With or without the improvements that I have suggested, however, the Bill will make a big contribution to-at long last-the achievement of her goal, and I thoroughly support it.

Dai Davies: Like many others who have spoken, I welcome the Bill and the continuing forecast for the eradication of child poverty.
	Let me touch on a few issues that, although they have already been raised, I consider to be important enough to mention again. First, there is the poverty of love. We have heard about the importance of marriage and families and about marriage break-up and its effect on children, but one of the major issues that I regularly encounter in my constituency is that of families who experience antisocial behaviour problems with their children. Such families need one-to-one assistance-focused help-but at present local authorities are finding it difficult to provide it. We have heard about the poverty of health, and, from the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), about poor housing, which is a huge problem in my constituency. It is a former mining constituency containing many terraced houses, and the loss of housing grants and inability to make repayments is a major problem.
	Disability has been mentioned, and another health issue, affecting both children and their parents, is that of mental health. There is huge pressure on children nowadays. There is stress and anxiety, not just in the home but in the community. We tend to take our eye off the ball when it comes to mental health, and I think we should focus on that in the coming months. We have also heard about the poverty of opportunity and ambition, and about the support that we should give children and young people to encourage them to want to get on. It is so easy to fall into the poverty trap, not just in financial terms but in terms of having no ambition and not wanting to change.
	When it comes to education, one of the major problems is sex education. We see many parents aged 12 or 13. We have forgotten about the education that is needed in telling children about the problems of having a family at such a young age.
	There is another problem on which I think all Departments need to work together. In other Bills, the Government have proposed fining families if children fail to attend school. Which families would that affect the most? It would tend to be those living below the poverty line. We have heard that £15,000 tends to be the average annual income, and that anything below that is seen to be poverty level. In my constituency, a significant number of people live on real incomes of well below £15,000 a year. Although there is a reliance on benefits, the worry is that those benefits can be taken away at any time.
	I have another concern about benefits and the benefits structure: where does the money end up? Does it end up benefiting the child? Is it targeted within the family to look after the children? Where is it spent, and how is it spent? Again, it comes back to education and helping families to understand that the money needs to be used in the right way.
	Another issue that has not been touched on is the role of grandparents and the wider family. In my constituency, we have a huge problem of children having children and very young people being caught in the family trap. The role of grandparents has been undermined in so many ways. The chances of grandparents to look after the children have been undermined. Their voices need to be heard.
	Constituencies such as mine have suffered over the past 30 years from the loss of traditional industries and manufacturing. I urge the Minister to ask the Prime Minister for sight of a report called The Other Half of Britain that was produced by the Alliance, which is primarily made up of local authorities from areas of the country that have suffered from the loss of traditional industries and therefore have a huge need for investment. I sent a copy of the report to the Prime Minister some 12 months ago. If he has not got it, I can provide another one.
	We heard again about partnership working by the voluntary and statutory sectors, but I worry that in some respects the statutory sector sees the voluntary sector as a threat. Instead of allowing it to do the job it does well, it tends to resent the interference, as it sees it sometimes, from the voluntary sector. There is a huge task to be performed throughout the country in encouraging increased partnership working.
	I was pleased, proud and privileged to be part of the end child poverty rally that was held in London earlier this year. I was lucky enough to have a number of my constituents alongside me and to be one of the 10,000 people in Trafalgar square. It showed again that the focus on ending child poverty goes much wider than this place.
	The Bill concentrates quite a lot on targets and statistics. I worry about targets and statistics. We can make statistics say anything we like. If targets are not realistic, they work as a disincentive to people to achieve; we need targets that can be achieved. That is a problem with the Bill.
	A promise of delivery in terms of ending child poverty is one thing, but just passing a Bill through the House will not achieve that. I am seeing services being cut in my constituency. I urge the Government to take the advice of the latest report from the House of Lords on the Barnett formula. It stated clearly, and so has Lord Barnett, that the formula needs to be reviewed. The Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Assembly Government have carried out their own review, which comes to the same conclusions. The distribution of wealth across the country should have a needs base within it; otherwise areas such as mine will find it very difficult to come out of the difficult times that we are in now and to recover from previous difficult times.
	We are losing community facilities. My other worry is that the first things to be cut by a local authority in times of austerity tend to be things that are seen as the flowery bits, the add-ons: community centres; places where young people can meet, be occupied and do things; and youth workers. There needs to be ring-fenced funding from central Government to local government, which must be told That is what the funding must be spent on, otherwise it will be spent on many other services.
	We in Wales were fortunate enough to be the first country in the UK to have a commissioner appointed for children. I know that that idea has now spread across the country. The influence of the commissioner has been significant in making many improvements in our areas. It is wonderful to come up with plans, strategies and initiatives but the problem is that, if the funding is not provided to take them forward, we will lose the plot. Again, to disincentivise people and to communicate things to people and then not deliver is the worse thing one can do. There is a huge difference between consultation and negotiation. If we consult and then fail to deliver, people will walk away.
	Over the past 30 or 40 years, we as a nation have struggled to understand the poverty issue not just in terms of children-as we heard earlier, we have struggled to understand it in terms of older people as well. We will be judged on how we provide for our senior citizens and our young people, who are the future of this country and are so important to us.
	There is more than enough in this country and the world for people's needs, but as we have seen over recent months, through the bonuses paid to bankers and the financial services collapse, there will never be enough for people's greed. I hope that the Government, through the Bill, will concentrate on those who need help the most.

David Drew: I am delighted to take part in this Second Reading debate and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Davies), who clearly has considerable expertise in this area. I would like to make my speech a tribute to someone who has not yet, as far as I know-I was out of the Chamber for a short time-been mentioned in the debate and should be mentioned. That is the late Peter Townsend, who passed away a couple of months ago. Peter was a friend. He was also a constituent in his later years and he was married to Baroness Corston.
	If one person has done more than anyone else to raise the issue of child poverty in this country, that person was Peter Townsend. I have a suggestion. It may be an informal one, but I hope that, as a mark of respect to Peter Townsend, the commission will be called the Peter Townsend child poverty commission. I understand that that may be difficult in terms of how these things work but, as many will know, Peter's work led to the setting up of the Child Poverty Action Group and set in motion much of the research work not just in this country but in the third world. He talked about the importance of the social security system in the developing world, where there are so many other issues to deal with-education, health, peace, trying to provide water-and he explained graphically why looking after the most vulnerable in the developing world is so important. I hope that we can apply that epitaph to this country. I am sure that he would be proud that we are legislating in this field now.
	I would like to thank the Government. The Bill Committee team has met on a couple of occasions with the all-party group on poverty. I am an officer of that group, which is genuinely all-party. The team met and discussed with us what was in the Bill and what we might like in the Bill. More than anything, it explained the structure and the thinking behind the Bill. Perhaps no one else will mention it, but there are some interesting findings in the consultation that was carried out-I know what others have said about the dirty word that consultation has become-and I hope that it will inform the Committee stage. As we take evidence from the various organisations, perhaps we can use that to improve the Bill still further.
	I pay credit to the End Child Poverty coalition. This is not the Government's Bill per se, because it is owned by a range of organisations. Although some aspersions have been cast about how the legislation has been approached, it is important to say that there is overwhelming support for the attempt to abolish-if that is the Prime Minister's word-child poverty. I hope that support can genuinely be spread across the House, because it has certainly spread across those organisations.
	Several years ago I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill, which looked at anti-poverty measures and how we should target them to try to eradicate poverty in the round. I thought that it was a largely consensual Bill, but it was opposed by the late Eric Forth-not so great in my eyes in this respect. However, I thought that the official Opposition had moved on from their view that poverty did not matter. I was somewhat taken aback by the speech of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), which took us back almost to thinking that her party had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but I was uplifted by the contribution made by the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), who is an acknowledged expert in this area. I hope that what he had to say reflects the tenor of the official Opposition's approach to this debate, rather than what we heard from their spokesperson.
	I was pleased that the Church of England mentioned in its submission William Temple, whom I consider to be the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury, mainly because he was a Christian socialist-alongside R.H. Tawney. It is, of course, a long-held view of the Christian Church in this country that we must attack poverty, and particularly child poverty.
	We must also take into account the issue of the demonstration of poverty. Poverty is, of course, all too apparent in our urban areas and we must bear down on that, but poverty exists in all areas of our society, and rural poverty has not been mentioned very much. I wish this was apocryphal, but I still remember that children who received free school meals were put on a separate table because that was the way it was always done. Although I hope that is now a thing of the past, even the fact that until comparatively recently we used free school meals, and the definition thereof, as a measure of poverty shows how little we have moved on in some respects, because anyone who knows anything about the rural domain will know that the one thing that children, and particularly their parents, will not want recognised is the fact that they are eligible for free school meals. That is indicative of how problematic it is to measure where poverty exists and how we can address it. People will hide from the fact of their poverty. They will live in denial, because they do not want to be faced with the fact that they will be labelled as the poor of the village. We must do something about that.
	The analysis by the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) was, as always, very helpful. We will, no doubt, have an interesting discussion on clause 15 in Committee-perhaps I will be chosen to serve on the Committee-as it is worthy of proper debate. It does look like a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Government. That was countered by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), who rightly said that the point is not the cost of dealing with poverty, but the fact that if we do not deal with it the costs thereof are even greater. I therefore hope the Government will not see this as an opportunity to slide out of their obligations, but will instead look very carefully at whether that is a necessary clause and whether it should be more tightly defined.
	I hope the commission will be proactive. It is a nice idea that it will come together four times a year, as has been said, and just look at whether the Government have done what they should have done. To be fair to this Government, they have been on a journey, all the way through the various reports they have brought forward and the work of the No. 10 policy unit and the social exclusion unit. I hope we will see this coming through and coming to fruition with the commission being seen not as a quango but as a very proactive body that engages with the poverty lobby, and that does so to the extent that representatives of those in poverty are a part of it. That is never easy. I and the other members of the all-party group on poverty had a difficult time in addressing how to engage with people in poverty, but not engaging with people in poverty is as unacceptable as paying lip service to that.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) said, it is important that we recognise that it is the responsibility of this place as well as Government to address how we make this legislation accountable. I would like the Government to say that they welcome an annual debate on this issue so we can see the progress that has been made, and I hope that that debate will be subject to some form of affirmation at the end so that we do genuinely test whether progress is being made. Because there are different Departments involved, we have to have a meaningful structure that covers the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Treasury and the devolved Departments to make sure there is proper joined-up thinking in how we scrutinise what the Government are doing.

Graham Stuart: As always, the hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful contribution. Does he think a Select Committee might be a better means of holding the Government to account than an annual debate, even if that were granted-Ministers usually oppose putting that into legislation? Such a debate may not have the same effect as perhaps bringing a number of relevant Ministers before a Select Committee where they can be examined in detail.

David Drew: Well, I am greedy because I want both. I want a Select Committee that embraces the different Departments because that is a good way to hold them to account, but I also want an annual debate in this Chamber so we can look meaningfully at what progress is being made and have a debate on that. To my mind, those two means serve different purposes and we should explore both.
	On the definition and measurement of success, I know we will have a debate on the 10 per cent. versus the 5 per cent. and I think it is right that we do so, and I also think it is right that we look at whether we can get down to 0 per cent. There is a danger of getting into a statistical morass when looking at the four different measures, but that does not mean that those of us who do not want to play with statistics should not look at what lies behind the statistics. Given that there are international obligations that we have to look at-the Department for International Development is examining how it measures its ability to deal with poverty in different parts of the world-we should be willing and able to reflect on what we are doing in this country.
	Local authorities are key. There is no point in pretending that central Government can tackle this issue. They certainly cannot do so in partnership with the voluntary sector; they have to do it in partnership with other parts of the statutory sector, in which local authorities are key. We have various performance indicators, which I hope can be addressed. I welcome the fact that almost all local authorities now include climate change in the targets they are willing to address, and I would hope that they would include child poverty as something that everybody wants to eradicate, but if we do not target resources on it locally, it never will be eradicated. I wish to see that happen. I also issue a plea for us to use the Sustainable Communities Act 2007. I want organisations to see this as one of the triggers they want clearly to identify themselves with in taking forward policies and having the motivation to ensure everyone is included.
	I am a wee bit nervous that some groups might be excluded from the measurement of children in poverty. Asylum seekers, those in care, Traveller families, and those who have specific disabilities and therefore do not appear on the radar screen are the very children who are the most vulnerable. If we say they are too difficult to measure and that it is impossible to see how we could eradicate their poverty, that is a sad indictment, because we ought to be looking at measures that can include those very difficult to measure and vulnerable groups.
	Moving towards what we want to achieve does not involve simply looking at the statistics and the four different measures. As many Members have said, it also involves looking at the poverty of aspiration, which is what causes the greatest dissatisfaction for those in poverty as they not only cannot see themselves getting out of poverty, but they cannot see how they can get their children out of poverty.
	Of course, attacking the cycle of deprivation must underlie our approach. With those reservations, and given that many Members have covered the points that I wished to talk about, I do not intend to speak for any longer. I hope that we can debate these matters in the presentations and the sittings that will be available in Committee, so that we can bring back an even stronger Bill to which everyone will commit themselves, because by 2020 we should have ended child poverty.

Graham Stuart: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) and to participate in tonight's debate, which has been of a universally high standard. Every speech that I have heard-I apologise for missing the first one, Mr. Deputy Speaker-has been thoughtful and constructive. I aim to continue in the same vein by not using this immensely serious subject-many hon. Members have pointed out its seriousness-for any partisan purpose.
	It is important that we examine where we are on this issue today. Over the past few years, child poverty in this country has increased enormously. As people have said, it doubled under the previous Conservative Government, on the definition that was being used, and some 3.4 million children were living in poverty when the current Government came to power. On the last available figures, that number had reduced by 600,000. My maths may be a little poor, but assuming that things have started to go into reverse in the current recessionary times, it is not unreasonable to expect that there might still be-or might be in the next few months-3 million children living in poverty. That is much further than 600,000 away from a halving of the poverty figure; I may be getting my numbers mixed up and I look forward to the Minister putting me right, but I fear that the situation might be worse than hon. Members are led to believe.
	The progress made to date in reducing the official poverty figure has largely been achieved by moving hundreds of thousands of people who were receiving a few pounds less per week than the poverty line to a position where they receive a few pounds more; there has not been a profound change with regard to the relative poverty of children in this country. The 600,000 whose position has changed have generally not moved very far; their situation has changed by only a few pounds a week. Of course, the converse of that is that even the smallest reduction in the income of those just above the poverty line plunges them back down below it, so that they are then officially in poverty. That is particularly relevant to the Prime Minister's and the Government's abolition of the 10p tax rate, some of whose impact has been ameliorated. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the people who face the biggest loss from the abolition of the 10p rate are those whose incomes are £149 a week. That figure corresponds almost exactly to the Government's official poverty line, which, for an individual, is £145 a week. It is as if the Government's poverty policy has been thrown into reverse and the tax change has been finely tuned to cause the maximum possible damage to their genuine and proper policy objectives.
	A former Labour Health Secretary has said that
	poverty has become more entrenched.
	I mentioned the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in an intervention, and it has concluded that
	the strategy against poverty and social exclusion pursued since the late 1990s is now largely exhausted.
	The Treasury itself says:
	Worklessness and low pay are the biggest direct causes of poverty. Living in a family where no adult is working puts a child at a 58 per cent. risk of poverty...Work remains the most sustainable route out of poverty: a child's risk of being in poverty falls from 58 per cent. to 14 per cent. when one or both of their parents is working.
	As hon. Members will know, if one or more parent is in permanent work and stays in work, the chance of their child being in poverty reduces further still.
	As has been said, the number of people living in severe poverty, which is defined as having less than 40 per cent. of median income, has risen by 600,000 since this Government came to power-measured after housing costs, the level is the highest for 30 years, at 5.2 million people, or 8.8 per cent. of the population. Some 40 per cent. of all people in poverty are now in severe poverty. The proportion of children living in severe poverty has also grown since 1998-99, increasing from 5 to 6 per cent. The number of children living in severe poverty has, thus, actually increased by 20 per cent. in the past 12 years. That is the situation with which we are dealing. I am certainly not saying all this in order to make any partisan point, because I recognise that Ministers and this Government have genuinely wrestled with this issue to try to create a fairer and more equal society.
	We have heard powerful speeches tonight from the hon. Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble). The hon. Member for Northampton, North discussed how crucial housing is to the welfare of children in poor households and said that the housing in her constituency is not up to standard and is woefully inadequate in quantity; the same is true in my constituency. Who would have thought that 12 years into this Government, during whose time in office there has been a period of sustained economic growth-at least until recent times-fewer affordable houses would have been built than in any year of either the Thatcher or Major Governments? I certainly would not have thought that. It remains a baffling cause for concern that during the times of relative plenty the Government did not find the opportunity to reform the planning system and did not find ways to work with communities, rather than imposing on them, in order to ensure that there were the houses that we need and that would make such a difference to families.
	Where someone is in a decent home in a community that has decent resources around it-even if numerically, according to the targets in this Bill, they are still in poverty-their life chances, well-being and morale are transformed. As has also been mentioned, the worst possible statistic for this country is the one showing that our children are the most miserable in Europe; there are more unhappy children in this country than in any other around.
	I make no apology for explaining where I think we are at on child poverty. We are not in the benign position of having had a transformation, with major strides having been made. In no way do I doubt either the resource or the will with which the Government have approached this issue, but I question whether any major strides have been made. It seems to me that, for the poorest in particular, the situation appears to be going backwards. I hope that the Minister will be able to talk through the strategies, rather than just the aspirations, that may turn things around.
	I am not sure whether I support the Bill, because I do not like legislation that makes promises that I fear will not be delivered. In a related area, the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill promises that every young person of 16 to 18 will be guaranteed a choice of two apprenticeships within a reasonable travel-to-work area by 2013, yet the legislation contains no tools or levers to show how on earth any Government would be able to deliver those apprenticeships. I therefore fear that the very young people who might most want and need them will not actually get them. Likewise, this Bill makes promises that I fear cannot be kept, because we cannot ignore the fact that the Government, despite the best will, have failed-or will fail-to deliver their relatively easy target of halving child poverty by next year. That target came at a time of fiscal surpluses, when we had a strong economy. But we will miss it. In the next few years, with £175 billion of borrowing this year, £173 billion next year and unprecedented pressure on our public finances, how can we believe that any Secretary of State will be able to deliver on these targets? I fear that they will not.
	We have an ageing population-in the coming decade we will have many more people over 80 and over 100-and social care costs will also put Government finances under pressure. The child poverty targets will either distort all other Government policy or-this is more likely, in my view-the two opt-outs in clause 15 will be used. If economic circumstances are not enough for the Secretary of State to use as an excuse, he or she will be able to cite fiscal circumstances as well. Obviously, the economic circumstances opt-out was not broad enough for them. The fear is that this is aspirational legislation, sending out false messages that any Government will struggle to deliver, given the fiscal inheritance of whoever wins the election next May.
	I ask Ministers to be as upfront as possible with people about what is possible given the likely available funding. The Secretary of State in the Bill will be the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, so the assumption is that benefits and tax credits will be used to deliver children out of poverty. That means that the benefit level for the average family on benefits will have to be set above the relative poverty line, but how will that be possible while maintaining the incentives to work and ensuring that we balance the books? I fear that this legislation is making promises that the Government cannot keep.
	We need to look at child poverty holistically. Despite clause 8 and its wish list of various things that the Secretary of State should bear in mind, will the Bill put in a place a strategy to deliver what it promises? I fear that it will not. What will we do about the fact that women in Scotland with no qualifications will tend to have three children, but only 11 per cent. of women with degrees will tend to have three children? The fewer qualifications a woman has, the more likely she is to produce children, and the earlier she is likely to do so. The danger is that if women with no qualifications become pregnant in their teens, they are likely to bring up children in a household with low aspirations and a single parent who struggles to find work because she lacks those qualifications. Until we tackle that issue, we will not make progress.
	Nor will we make progress until we tackle educational failings. Leitch's report suggested that the number of unskilled jobs would collapse between now and 2020-from more than 2 million to 600,000. There will be very few jobs for people who are unskilled, but have educational outcomes improved in this period of economic growth? The number of NEETs has gone up and the percentage of children who get no GCSEs has fallen by only a tiny amount-from 10.3 to 10.2 per cent. On the wider societal issues, such as housing, supporting families to bring up children and education, I do not see how this Bill will make a difference.
	The hon. Member for Foyle said that we must pass a Bill that actually means something, and commented that the Government have resiled from their previous promises-the aim in respect of the eradication of child poverty is no longer to have 5 per cent. or less of children in poverty but 10 per cent. That needs to be looked at in Committee, but most of all we need to ensure when we make promises to the people of this country, they are well founded and can be delivered.

John Mason: My party welcomes this Bill. I wish to associate myself in particular with the speeches by the hon. Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Northavon (Steve Webb), although almost every hon. Member who has spoken has made some good points.
	We clearly need to tackle income inequality and the root causes of disadvantage, and we need to support people in poverty now. Some of the explanatory notes are very good and summarise where we are trying to go. Paragraph 131 says:
	It is nearly impossible to quantify the financial benefits of eradicating child poverty. Growing up in poverty can damage cognitive, social and emotional development, which are all determinants of future outcomes for a child. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that child poverty costs at least £25 billion a year in Britain, and that £17 billion could accrue to the Exchequer if child poverty were eradicated. However, this is a possible under-estimate of the true benefit. There are other benefits associated with the eradication of child poverty which are difficult to quantify such as equity, reducing hardship, deprivation and exclusion and breaking the intergenerational poverty link.
	Those points have been referred to by many of the Members who have spoken.
	The current economic climate is leading to more families in poverty, and more families who could fall into poverty. We cannot have this debate without talking about resources, which have not been touched on as much as I hoped. At the last Budget, the Child Poverty Action Group called on the Chancellor to invest at least £3 billion in tax credits and benefits. When that did not happen, the CPAG said there was a danger that the Bill would have
	no credibility from the outset.
	Without real money, I do not see how we can possibly meet the child poverty targets. Instead, with budgets being cut, as I fear both major parties seek to do-although they may quibble over who is cutting more-we shall not see much progress. The Budget this year did little to help, so I would be interested to hear from the Financial Secretary at the end of the debate whether there will be real resources in the pre-Budget report this autumn to help to address the shortfall.
	We need to simplify the tax credit scheme and promote greater availability of child care vouchers. There is a problem for people whose weekly hours fall below 16, because they lose tax credits. There is a particular problem for single-parent families. We are told that 52 per cent. of them were in poverty in 2007-08. Parents may not be to blame for a family coming apart, but it is clear that the children suffer.
	Relative inequality is definitely a problem. We have heard many examples of children who cannot do the same things as other children in their class. Gingerbread gives this example:
	My children have also been unable to go on school trips because I cannot afford it...and my children were the only ones not to go.
	School trips may not be the most essential thing in life, but I find such statements particularly touching.
	By many accounts, my Glasgow, East constituency has some of the greatest poverty in the country. Housing is the issue that people most often come to see me about. It has been touched on already, so I will not go into great detail, but the examples given by the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) were extremely relevant and touching. So many kids are brought up in overcrowded, unsuitable accommodation in the 21st century.
	Clause 2 contains a 10 per cent. target, but as I said in an intervention, I wonder whether that is ambitious enough. Clearly that target is much further on than we are at present, so it is definitely to be welcomed-but given the number of voices who question it, including those of Barnardo's, Save the Children and Gingerbread, we have to wonder whether it is enough. If we said that next year only 10 per cent. of houses in the UK would be broken into, so by definition house-breaking would be eradicated, many Members would not accept it, and neither would the public. As has already been suggested, if the plan was to remove 10 per cent. of Members from the House, a lot of us would not be very keen on it. In reality, none of us think that 10 per cent. will be acceptable in the long term, although I acknowledge that it is a big improvement on the current situation. Perhaps we should stop using words such as eradicate and abolish, because that is not what will happen.
	Clause 15 has been referred to, and some of my fears have been echoed. Barnardo's mention that clause too. Is it a get-out clause? We should be interested in reassurance from the Financial Secretary that that is not the case. Perhaps the Committee might come up with better wording for it. Are the factors mentioned simply factors that have to be taken into account, or can they override the targets?
	We have not heard very much about interim targets. It seems to be accepted that the 2010 target, the halfway point, will be missed. Will the Minister who responds to the debate state that everyone now accepts that? It strikes me that if we are now aiming for 2020 there should be an interim target of 2015-a point at which we could measure progress.
	One or two Members have asked whether the commission should be beefed up. Should it have a bigger budget and more powers? The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said that he would like it to consult outside experts. That in itself would presumably increase the time for which it needed to meet, and its expenses. If the commission is to do its own research and call for evidence, it will need a budget for that. Like others, I welcome the fact that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are to appoint their own commissioners, which has not always happened in other cases, such as broadcasting.
	It concerns me that no actual figures in pounds and pence are being mentioned. I accept the relative measures that are being given, but I wonder whether they are enough in themselves. Perhaps we need to look at minimum income standards and consider raising the minimum wage. One of the London charities that submitted evidence reminds us of some of the figures that we are talking about:
	Nowhere in the government's measures of poverty is there any estimate of what it actually costs every week to live healthily in the expensive UK economy. The current...adult unemployment benefits...are £64.30 a week, but £50.95 a week aged 18-25; they are half, or less than, the government's poverty threshold and 42 per cent. of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standard
	after housing costs
	of £144 a week.
	We need to introduce some solid reality. I know that costs change year by year, but there seems to be a lack of reality in the Bill.
	Tax credits were mentioned when I asked about the minimum wage. Although we welcome tax credits, and the fact that they boost family income, in one sense they just subsidise profitable employers. Employers can then employ staff at the minimum wage, which people clearly cannot live on, and make huge profits. I have a problem with that.
	Consultation is good, but I notice that clause 9(4)(c) talks about consulting children or organisations that represent children. That or should be an and because children should definitely be consulted.
	I suspect that more than one Secretary of State will be involved in all this, because the Secretary of State for Scotland will be involved in some of the processes. I hope that the Secretaries of State will be constructive in their dealings with Holyrood and the other devolved Administrations. I want to make some points from a Scottish point of view. The Scottish Government are fully signed up to the UK target of halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it by 2020. In Scotland 20 per cent. of children are in poverty, which is only marginally better than the UK as a whole. The Scottish Government welcome the positive contact that there has been between the Minister and our Deputy First Minister.
	There has been some mention of grandparents and other relatives. The whole issue of kinship care needs to be looked at. I know that in Scotland some local authorities, and the Scottish Government, are trying to help grandparents and other relatives who look after children, but there seem to be problems with the Department for Work and Pensions penalising people. That needs to be looked into.
	The Scottish Government would like to replace council tax with a local income tax, which would definitely help poorer families. Scotland believes that we will be able to tackle the issues of child poverty best when we have the full powers of taxation, spending and social welfare under our control, but we seek to do what we can with what we have.
	I note that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) mentioned that money came from Westminster and was not used in the same way as it was in England. However, he then mentioned that hospital appointments were important for disabled people. One of the things that the present Government of Scotland have done is to keep open more hospitals that were planned for closure. A lot of the levers still lie with the UK Government, but I hope that that disadvantage can be addressed in due course.
	Local government in Scotland has also been mentioned. I do not know whether exactly the same applies in Wales and Northern Ireland, but we have the concordat, which means that local government and the Scottish Government try to work together on more issues, rather than taking a top-down approach. However, that means that it is more difficult to have ring-fencing and to insist on local government toeing a certain line. However, to be fair to local authorities-I know best the authority in Glasgow, which probably has a lot of the problems in Scotland-they are very committed to tackling child poverty too.
	I hope that there can be a constructive relationship between Westminster and Holyrood. It is a question of balance, because some factors are almost purely Westminster issues, while others are purely Holyrood issues. However, as the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) said, there is also a twilight area where a lot of the factors interrelate. In the past there have been some unfortunate examples of a lack of working together. For instance, the Scottish Government were approached on 19 March for a response to the Equality Bill that was required by 25 March. Six days for a Government response is really not what we are looking for.
	We are in complete agreement that child poverty is one of the foremost issues, now and for the coming years. We support the Bill; my only question is whether it is specific enough, whether it is tough enough and whether it goes far enough.

Sammy Wilson: The difficulty towards the end of such a debate is that many of the points that one wished to raise have already been raised. However, some of the issues that I want to raise may run counter to those raised in many of the speeches in this debate.
	First, I welcome the objectives of the Bill. We have had a good run-through this evening of the impacts that child poverty has on children throughout the United Kingdom and the consequences for society in lost opportunities, crime, problems in later life and so on. However, I am not so sure that the approach taken in the Bill is necessarily a good way of dealing with the issue. Hon. Members have drawn parallels between this Bill and the Climate Change Act 2008-some people may know my views on that-under which long-term targets have been set. Those targets will span not just this Administration, but another Administration and perhaps another one after that. At the end, nobody will be held responsible for targets that may be set 10 or 20 years in advance. To throw in a commission in order to try to provide some continuity is something that I am not so sure about-and I will come to the commission in a moment. I am not sure that the approach that we are debating is necessarily the best way forward.
	Secondly, let us introduce a bit of realism. Hon. Members have already made the point that the issue should not be about simply scoring political points off the Government who happen to have responsibility for taking through legislation and public policy at the moment. However, even with their commitment to reaching their target of reducing child poverty by 50 per cent., this Government were unable to achieve their targets during the best of economic times. At a time when employment was riding high and public finances were abundant, those targets were not met. This Bill is being introduced in the context of immense pressure on public sector finances, with a period of rising unemployment and the impact of other policies. For example, last week the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced a policy that will add, some believe, £230 a year to households' energy bills.
	We must therefore be realistic when we set these targets. We must not create an expectation that we can meet a target that we were unable to meet in the good circumstances, because we are unlikely to be able to meet it in the circumstances that we will face in future. I take issue with the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who used the word slipperiness in referring to the clause saying that economic and financial circumstances should be taken into consideration. To a certain extent, that is simply being sensible. We are looking at a policy that will apply that far ahead and in circumstances that we cannot possibly foresee and unless we skew all the other policies around it, we must have some way of evaluating the targets that we are aiming for but that circumstances might prevent us from achieving.
	My next point flows from that. There is an obligation on devolved Administrations to bring forward a strategic plan for dealing with this issue. I take the point that it is not simply about levels of income. Perhaps the Bill focuses too much on that, although, to be fair to the Government, the guidance that they have given goes much wider to include housing, education and a range of other things. However, there will still be resource implications that vary across different parts of the country. In some places there will be deeper deprivation, and therefore a greater problem, than in others; the causes of poverty might be much more expensive to deal with than elsewhere.
	Without the commitment of resources-I am thinking particularly of devolved Administrations such as Northern Ireland, where, given the higher levels of deprivation and child poverty, there are greater consequences in dealing with this-we will not meet the targets for 2010 that we had hoped to meet. Only last week, the House of Lords indicated-the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) will not like to hear this-that Wales and Northern Ireland have lost out on the Barnett formula. As a result, the resources that have been made available are less than what is required to bring Northern Ireland up to the levels that would give us greater equality with the rest of the United Kingdom. Some Members have asked how, if the money available through the Barnett funding mechanism is not ring-fenced, we can be sure that it will be spent on these issues. However, the fact that the child poverty strategy has been brought forward indicates that the necessary resources have to be directed towards dealing with it.
	I am not sure I agree with criticisms of other aspects of the Bill. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said that the strategy for dealing with these issues would be imposed on, or left to, local councils as the deliverers in England, and that there would be disadvantages to that. Given the different circumstances in different parts of the United Kingdom, that degree of flexibility for local councils or devolved Administrations to bring forward their own strategies is a good part of the Bill. Administrations are guided towards certain areas, but some will have different emphases. In rural areas, for example, the issues of poverty might be much different from those in inner-city areas. Giving the responsibility to local authorities or devolved Administrations to draft their own strategies rather than having them imposed from the centre is, I believe, a good idea.
	Let me consider the circumstances in Northern Ireland. One thing that helps to release people from poverty-it has been mentioned tonight-is a good sound education and once we had a devolved Administration in Northern Ireland, we moved away from the policy that the Government were introducing of doing away with grammar schools in Northern Ireland. We believed that grammar schools were one way of giving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity to climb the ladder out of that background and impoverishment. When it comes to the delivery of some of the programmes, especially those that offer help with families that have difficulties or that are dysfunctional, Churches in Northern Ireland could have a huge input-and perhaps more so than in other parts of the United Kingdom. A strategy that recognises such opportunities and their strengths should be within the remit of the local administration. That flexibility is good, and we should not turn our backs on it.
	My last point concerns the need for the commission. Its role is to provide the data, to scrutinise and evaluate the policy, to carry out research into child poverty and to have the expertise in dealing with families that experience poverty and so on. We are told that it will not cost very much. We have not even got the Bill through and groups are already saying that the commission is under-resourced and should have more. Let us face it-once such an organisation is set up, the impetus is always for it to be expanded into a bigger bureaucracy and a bigger quango, not shrunk. As the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, the real place where the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of this policy should be undertaken is Parliament. This is where Ministers should be brought to account, whether through Select Committees or in annual debates in the House. This-not some quango-is the place for such scrutiny. Of course, quangos often take on a life of their own anyway. Few quangos vote, or produce reports, to say that they are no longer needed. They always find some reason for their continued existence.
	I have heard so many times in this House that we have to reduce the cost of government. However, it seems that on almost every occasion when we come forward with some new ideas or policies to deal with a particular problem, we set up more extra-parliamentary bodies. I believe that that is the wrong way forward.
	I look forward to Committee. I know that the devolved Administration in Northern Ireland will be actively involved in considering a strategy for dealing with child poverty, which will have to cross all the various Departments within that Administration. I hope that where resources are required centrally for that strategy, they will be made available.

David Gauke: We have had an interesting and thoughtful debate with contributions from all parts of the House and all parts of the United Kingdom. We heard 13 contributions from the Back Benches, and I would particularly like to thank my hon. Friends the Members for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), for Henley (John Howell) and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) for three excellent speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon set out the case that poverty is not just about money and stressed the importance of stability and security in children's upbringing. My hon. Friend the Member for Henley set out some of the challenges for local authorities and some of the difficulties that the Bill may cause. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness rightly stated that the debate included many high-quality speeches, and proceeded to deliver one himself. It touched on many issues, including educational standards and housing.
	There is some consensus here. We strongly share the aspiration to eradicate child poverty by 2020. We believe that high levels of child poverty reveal a waste of potential in a globalised world, in which there are opportunities for many more people than was previously the case to achieve greater material wealth. Children who are excluded from those opportunities will fall further and further behind. It is not good for any of us if a section of society is excluded from the benefits of what we hope will be a growing economy in the years ahead, stuck in a culture of low aspiration and dependency and attaining poor educational qualifications. All that results in a cycle of deprivation, and it becomes increasingly hard for any child born into poverty to escape it. That is bad for those in poverty and for society as a whole. For those reasons, we support the aspiration behind the Bill.
	On a positive note, the debate appears to be moving in a more sensible direction. There was a time when the Government's response to all such questions was simply, More money, and a view that any problem, including child poverty, could be addressed by more public expenditure-more money in benefits and tax credits. If we exclude the Secretary of State's contribution to the debate, it appears that the Government have moved on from that one-dimensional approach.
	The Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that one could spend £4.2 billion to meet the 2010 target. That is not a recommendation, merely an assessment of what could be done by spending that amount on child benefit and tax credits. It also calculates that the 2020 target could be achieved by spending £19 billion in 2008-09 prices. However, the Government appear to recognise that that is not a sustainable method of delivering. We agree.
	We welcome the Government's acknowledgement of the need for a wide range of interventions. It must be said that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) has set the terms of the debate. The greater focus on family breakdown, drug and alcohol dependency and worklessness has meant that we now have a more sensible debate on such matters. The Government's record on poverty and reducing the gap between the poorest and the rest of society is disappointing. As we have heard, they are failing to meet their 2010 target-it is estimated that it will be missed by 600,000 children-and child poverty is increasing.
	Sometimes the Government make the excuse that everything was going swimmingly until the recession came along. That is wrong on two counts. First, long before the recession arrived, the Government were destined to miss their 2010 target. In February 2009, the IFS said that its
	forecast of child poverty in 2010 would be very slightly lower if the economy were to perform worse than the Treasury assumed in the PBR. This is because lower employment and real earnings have more effect on median income (and thus the poverty line) than on the income of low-income families with children (in which the parents are less likely to be working than in the median household).
	The recession is, therefore, according to the IFS, to the advantage of meeting the child poverty target.
	The hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) said that tackling inequality and poverty was what his party was about and what the Government were for. However, it is not just in the area of child poverty that this Government are failing. The average weekly income, after housing, of the poorest 10 per cent. has fallen from £98 in 2003-04 to £87 in 2007-08. The Gini index shows inequality at a record high. Life expectancy differences between the poor and the rest have widened since Labour came to power, as have infant mortality rates. Youth unemployment is a third higher than when Labour took office, and the number of people on out-of-work benefits has not fallen below 5 million in the past 12 years. Of that figure, 1.1 million people of working age have never worked a day while Labour has been in power. Child poverty is just one example of the Government's approach to poverty having failed.
	It is therefore not surprising that there is a degree of scepticism about the Bill, which is more about distracting attention from the failure of the 2010 target than it is about the 2020 target. I shall make an analogy. Let us imagine a school pupil who is about to sit his GCSEs. He has not completed all his coursework, he has not revised, and he is clearly destined to fail his GCSEs. He says to his worried parents, Don't worry, Mum. Don't worry, Dad. I hereby pledge-it is not an aspiration, it is a pledge-to obtain a postgraduate degree within 10 years. In 12 months' time I will set out my strategy for how I will do that. I think the parents could be forgiven for not being overly impressed, and we are not overly impressed by the Government's approach. They are failing on the target that is about to arrive, so instead they focus on something that will happen in 10 years' time by concentrating on an aspiration well beyond the next general election.
	A further concern that we have is about accountability. Clause 1 states that it is
	the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that...targets are met.
	I hope that in Committee we will be able to examine to whom exactly that duty is owed. What will happen if the target is not met? Will it be possible to take the Secretary of State to court if he or she fails to meet a target? Will the courts be able to block a policy initiative if it is inconsistent with that duty, or will they be able to initiate policy? If so, there has to be distinct unease, because those are matters for a democratically accountable politician. They are matters for Ministers, not unelected judges, and that would start to blur the line between what is rightfully done in this place and by people accountable to it and what is done in the courts. If it is not for the courts to make such decisions, that prompts the question of what the point of the Bill is, other than to be a glorified press release.
	Part 2 of the Bill sets out the role of local authorities. We recognise and welcome the importance of local authorities playing a role in tackling child poverty, and we recognise that a lot of problems are of a local nature. That point has been made by a number of hon. Members on both sides of the House. However, part 2 contains a list of duties on local authorities: to make arrangements to promote co-operation with partner authorities, to publish a local child poverty needs assessment, to prepare a joint child poverty strategy and to have regard to any guidance given by the Secretary of State. That is very much a top-down view of what local authorities should do.
	Essentially, the Government's view as expressed in the Bill is that local authorities are there to administer the priorities of central Government. Under the Bill, there is no discretion as regards which of the partner authorities local authorities should work with, or what measurement of child poverty should be used. Is there an argument for a wider range of measurements being available for local authorities to use? My hon. Friend the Member for Henley set out what some local authorities are doing. Will that help or hinder?
	The requirement to have regard to the Secretary of State's guidance could result-we will want to examine this in Committee-in the Secretary of State being able to force local authorities to act in a particular way. That would make local authorities look to what central Government want, rather than to the local people whom they are there to represent.

Graham Stuart: My hon. Friend puts his finger on an important point. On the guidance from the Secretary of State, there will be fear that if the Government impose an urban model, albeit with good will, it will have a disastrous impact on locally tailored policies in rural areas such as the East Riding of Yorkshire, which I represent. That would be the case even if the urban model was appropriate, even if the Government had got it absolutely right and even if it worked in urban areas.

David Gauke: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is exactly the concern. I hope that we will be able to examine that issue. The situation will partly depend on how the powers given to the Secretary of State are applied, but there is clearly a concern. We believe that logically there is a role for local authorities; a lot of problems relating to poverty are local in nature, so clearly local authorities must have discretion in deciding how to tackle them. The concern is whether the balance will be right, and I hope that we will examine that in greater detail in Committee.
	We need to know what the burden on local authorities will be, and whether the Bill will be an effective way of reducing child poverty. There is a concern that the response to part 2 will be a plethora of advertisements in  The Guardian for a child poverty strategy co-ordinator, tasked with engaging in a permanent dialogue with key stakeholders and partner authorities to develop a cross-cutting strategic plan to meet statutory child poverty objectives, but that little will be done to move significant numbers of children out of poverty.

Graham Stuart: Does my hon. Friend think that it is an omission that there is no mention of children's trusts? They are supposed to have been put into statutory form already, and are supposed to bring together the various agencies; it is rather odd that they are not mentioned in the Bill.

David Gauke: Again, my hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I do not know whether we should take that as his application to be on the Public Bill Committee, but it sounds as though he has a host of good ideas that he will want to bring to the Committee.
	We support the aspiration behind the Bill, but the Bill shares some of the less attractive characteristics of the Government. It looks bureaucratic, and it looks as though it is centralising, rather than localising. There is one other important point. One might expect a Government to proceed by first setting out their objectives, then setting out a strategy on how to deliver those objectives, and then delivering, but after 12 years, the Government have failed to deliver, so they resort to repackaging their objectives in the Bill without explaining how they will deliver. Whatever its qualities, the Bill is a style-over-substance measure. It is about political positioning before delivery. It is a Bill from a Government who have given up on delivery. It is a Bill from a Government who have given up. Where this Government have failed, others must succeed.

Stephen Timms: I agree that we have had an excellent debate. I really hope that we can forge a consensus on the aims of the Bill and the reforms that it will deliver. The goal is that no child's life prospects should be limited by an upbringing in poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) was among the contributors to the debate who set out how some of those limitations are applied in practice. Every child should have a good start in life, a fulfilling childhood and opportunities to thrive and flourish. That is why, after 1997, we first halted and then reversed the previously inexorable rise in child poverty. There are 500,000 fewer children living below the poverty line than there were in 1999, and another 500,000 are expected to be lifted above the line by the measures announced in the past couple of years.
	I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on child poverty in London, and I agree with her that it is dishonest to pretend that there has been no progress over the past 10 years, although I welcome the fact that Conservative Members are now willing to talk about poverty in a way that simply did not happen when we had a Conservative Government. There has been substantial progress over the past 10 years. Reforms since 1997 have made households with children in the least well-off fifth of the population £4,750 a year better off, on average. The minimum income for a family with one child and one person working 35 hours a week has increased by more than 30 per cent. in real terms since 1999. There has been very substantial progress, but there remains a great deal more to do. That is the importance of the Bill, which will provide renewed impetus, build and sustain momentum and create a clear definition of success. It will put in place a framework for accountability and improve partnership working at local level to tackle child poverty.
	The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) made a particularly interesting speech, drawing on his many years of work in this area. I am grateful for his support for the Bill and I agree with his characterisation of what was happening inexorably under the Tory Government. I hope that he will send me some of his collected works; I look forward to reading them over the summer, and to having a rigorous debate with him and others in Committee after the break.
	The hon. Gentleman and one or two others suggested that the current fiscal pressures put the ambitions for 2020 at risk. I would rather put it the other way round. Under the obligations in the Bill, once it receives Royal Assent, we need to devise a strategy for child poverty that is consistent with the fiscal consolidation that will be necessary over the next few years. That is what clause 15 requires. The eradication of child poverty and the fiscal consolidation set out in the Budget are not incompatible, and the strategy that the Bill requires will have to demonstrate how we can deliver both. Financial support will have to be tightly targeted-that is true. Having a job is the best way out of poverty, but too many families today remain below the poverty line even though a family member is in work. We need to do better for those families, and to set out in the strategy how public services, which have seen a huge boost in funding over the past 10 years, will help us to tackle poverty.
	Some hon. Members have rightly said that the benefits of the proposals will far outweigh the costs. Creating a fairer society will benefit everyone. Without the action that we are proposing, we would need to continue meeting the real and high costs of inequality, and we would continue to miss out on the value of unfulfilled potential. The eradication of child poverty will have significant benefits for the economy. Entrenched crime and poor health impose big costs on public services and prevent them from operating as effectively as they could.
	The hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) was right to mention the recent estimate by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that the cost to the economy of child poverty is around £25 billion a year. The challenge is to work out how to tackle that cost effectively, and to realise those substantial cost savings over time in a way that is consistent with the consolidation that will be needed over the next few years. That is what the strategy required by the Bill will need to do.
	Measuring poverty is not straightforward; there are widely different approaches to it, and we have heard about some of them in the debate. The definition of success in the Bill results from careful and widespread consideration and consultation. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) referred to the widespread consultation that had taken place, and to the quite widely held sense of ownership of the Bill and of the way it sets about its task. It involves four poverty measures: relative poverty, combined low income and material deprivation, absolute low income and persistent poverty. Those four reflect the reality that income and the length of time experienced on low income and being without things are all important, and success will be achieved only if all four of those targets are hit. Those targets are ambitious, but achievable. If we meet them by 2020 and maintain them subsequently, we can be confident of making a big impact on children's well-being and on the well-being of the country, as those children go on to become adults.

Graham Stuart: My constituents often tell me that they get frustrated when, as soon as a target they have heard about looks as though it will fail to be achieved, there is a big fanfare announcing something new. Will the Minister address the 2010 target and square with the House about where we are with it so that we have some context when we talk about the Bill.

Stephen Timms: I am happy to do so. I refer the hon. Gentleman to the assessment made by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which I believe estimates that on the basis of policy currently in place, we can expect to get about two thirds of the way to the target by the end of 2010-11. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions explained earlier that pressure on the public finances constrains what we can do, but we have certainly not given up, and we may be able to go further in the announcements to follow before the end of the 2010-11 period.
	I welcome many of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) put forward. She is consistent in championing the need for better housing and she provided some powerful examples from her constituency. One of the indicators in the material deprivation index is whether or not children over 10 of different genders have their own room-an issue that she raised, which is at least touched on in the Bill.
	All the targets refer to income, but I agree that it is important to approach the issue of child poverty from a variety of angles, working across the whole of Government and at a local level. The Bill recognises the importance of narrowing the education attainment gap for disadvantaged children and of reducing infant mortality, but it is right to focus on income in order to address the lack of experiences and opportunities from which children in low-income families suffer. The Bill's strategy will drive action to tackle such poverty across the so-called building blocks underlying the income targets. Hitting all four of those targets will provide real and lasting improvement to the well-being of children in the UK.
	The hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) made a connection between family break-up and poverty-and there is, of course, a connection between them. The shadow Secretary of State quoted from the regulatory impact assessment, where it said that low incomes can cause strain in relationships leading to family breakdown, while family breakdown can exacerbate or even cause poverty. I would advise caution regarding some of the points made by the hon. Gentleman and others about the so-called couples penalty. In particular, it remains the case that the likelihood of poverty is twice as high in one-parent households as in two-parent households, which needs to be borne in mind as we set about tackling the problem.
	I agree with those who applauded the contribution of the third sector. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) made the same point, and I join her in paying tribute to the work of organisations in Wales. The hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Davies) talked about the work of the End Child Poverty coalition, which does great work in every part of the UK. I join those hon. Members who paid tribute to the work of the Welsh Assembly Government in this area, as they have had measures in place since March, including duties on Welsh Ministers to prepare a child poverty strategy and update it every three years.
	The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) set out his concerns about the role of local authorities in the Bill, but it has been widely recognised that tackling child poverty cannot be a priority only for central Government Departments; it must also be a priority for local authorities and their partners. Obviously, tackling child poverty helps local communities, and many local authorities have made a commitment to tackling child poverty. Good work is under way, and local authorities have given a lot of support to the proposals in the Bill. However, we need local authorities and their partners to do more, even in seemingly affluent areas such as-dare I say it-Henley. The legislation will be accompanied by support to help local partnerships as they work together. The Bill embraces Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as Wales, and I am grateful for the support and help from both Administrations in the progress that we have made on the Bill.
	Clause 15 is not, as one or two Members have suggested, a get-out clause. The only way of avoiding the duty to meet the targets under the Bill would be to repeal the legislation. Clause 15 is about how, not whether, the Government meet the targets, in a value-for-money way that is consistent with the needs of the wider economy.
	Our vision of a fairer society in which no child is left behind, and every child has the chance to flourish, is one that I hope the whole House will embrace. The House will have appreciated the tribute paid by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud to Peter Townsend, and I agree with him about Professor Townsend's huge contribution to drawing attention to the issue. Too many families are still on the edge of coping. There should not be, but there are, families who cannot afford to eat properly, keep their home warm or pay for basics such as school uniform or outings, let alone buy presents for birthday parties, as we have heard.
	Children who grow up in poverty lack experiences and opportunities that others take for granted, and the exclusion that results can last for a lifetime. We can change that, and we must. The Bill is a key step, and I look forward to the detailed debates after the recess. I commend the Bill to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Child Poverty Bill (Programme)

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7),
	That the following provisions shall apply to the Child Poverty Bill:
	 Committal
	1. The Bill shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.
	 Proceedings in Public Bill Committee
	2. Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Tuesday 3 November.
	3. The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
	 Consideration and Third Reading
	4. Proceedings on consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
	5. Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
	6. Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on consideration and Third Reading.
	 Other proceedings
	7. Any other proceedings on the Bill (including any proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments or on any further messages from the Lords) may be programmed.- ( Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Child Poverty Bill [Money]

Queen's recommendation signified.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
	That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Child Poverty Bill, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of-
	(1) any expenditure incurred under or by virtue of the Act by a Minister of the Crown, and
	(2) any increase attributable to the Act in the sums payable under any other Act out of money so provided.- (Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

child poverty (carry-over)

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 80 A(1)(a) ,
	That if, at the conclusion of this Session of Parliament, proceedings on the Child Poverty Bill have not been completed, they shall be resumed in the next Session .-(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: We have today received a message from the Lords. The Lords agree without amendment to the amendments made by the Commons to the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill. We can therefore pass over motion 6 on the Order Paper.

Political Parties and Elections Bill

Consideration of Lords message

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The Lords do not insist on their amendments to the Political Parties and Elections Bill, to which the Commons have disagreed, but they disagree with the amendments proposed by the Commons in lieu of those amendments, and propose amendments in lieu of those Commons amendments, to which they desire the agreement of the Commons.
	 Lords message considered forthwith (Programme Order,  13 July ).

Michael Wills: I beg to move,
	That this House does not insist on its Amendments Nos. 12A to 12F in lieu of Lords Amendments Nos. 11 and 12, and agrees with the Lords in their Amendments Nos. 12G to 12N in lieu.
	As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice made clear at the time, amendments 12A to 12F were not fully workable. The Government therefore tabled further amendments 12G to 12N in lieu. Those amendments have been agreed to today in another place.
	The Government's amendments seek to address the legal, technical and basic operational deficiencies with the amendments moved by Lord Campbell-Savours. As such, should the amendments be agreed to, we would want to discuss carefully their implementation with the parties and the Electoral Commission in due course before the new restriction came into force.
	Amendments 12G to 12N remedy some of the deficiencies in amendments 12A to 12F. They raise the permissibility threshold in relation to taxation status from £500 to £7,500, aligning it with the threshold at which a declaration will be required. That will be far easier for parties and donors to operate. We have required aggregation of donations above £500 which in aggregate exceed £7,500 in a calendar year to the same recipient. The amendments ensure that the new restriction applies to loans as well as donations. They also ensure that for the purposes of the aggregation provisions, donations and loans from the same source must be added together.
	We have made it clear that in the majority of cases, a party or other donee will satisfy the requirement to take all reasonable steps to verify a donation's permissibility if it receives a declaration from the individual in regard to taxation status. A party would be required to take further steps only if it had reasonable grounds to consider the declaration to be incorrect. We believe that that approach strikes the right balance by minimising the burden on parties and donors and ensuring a workable restriction.
	Lords amendment 121 gives the Secretary of State power to make further supplementary incidental or consequential provision at the point of commencement of the new restriction.
	I hope that the amendments will be accepted here, as they were in another place. They would be a proportionate and effective way of maintaining the spirit of the amendments originally tabled by Lord Campbell-Savours, and I commend them to the House.

Lembit �pik: rose-

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Has the Minister completed his remarks?

Michael Wills: Yes.

Jonathan Djanogly: The amendments represent a clarification of the Government's new position-set out this time last week-in relation to exceptions to those who can constitute acceptable donors. In practice, they have been clarified on the Government's own terms, because of the deficiencies in their own amendments last week and not on the basis of any kind of consensus.
	Once again we were given very little notice of amendments in the Government's rush to finalise legislation, but perhaps I should not be surprised, given that we received the Government's earlier amendments only six hours before we debated them in the House a week ago. That is not how we should be making the laws of this country. We expect to be given an opportunity to scrutinise the major changes in our electoral law that the Government propose.
	The Government's performance has been chaotic and confusing. We are here to ensure that effective legislation is produced, and that means dealing with the incredibly detailed legal arguments involved in the amendments in a controlled and balanced manner. In its briefing on the amendments, the Electoral Commission itself says,
	we have not yet had time to analyse the amendments fully.
	It is evident from the speed with which we received the amendments, and from the turnaround involved in dealing with them, that the Government have not had enough time in which to consider, in full, their implications and whether they work in practice. We are particularly surprised that the Government are bulldozing them through, given the lengths to which they went last week to secure a carry-over motion so that the Bill could be dealt with after the summer recess. I ask the Minister why, given the depth and complexity of the subject matter, the Government do not consider the issues that we have raised with them over the recess, and allow Parliament to produce effective and fully considered legislation when we return.
	These latest amendments, which were debated in the other place this afternoon, attempt to improve technically the amendments that we debated last Monday on the permissibility of donations for those who wish to support our democracy but are currently resident overseas. Again, these amendments have been clarified on the Government's own terms. The Government have ignored a host of important issues, and have pressed ahead with the amendments in the face of strong arguments for our belief that the legislation is flawed.
	A week ago, I presented a number of reasons for our inability to accept the fairness of the amendments. The fact remains that the clause will be extremely hard to implement, and we feel that it could be unreasonable to impose requirements that are so difficult to meet when the consequences are so draconian. This proposal may be an infringement of an individual's right to freedom of expression, it is likely to be contrary to EU law, it would certainly contribute to the isolation of UK citizens living abroad, it is contrary to regulatory principles, and it links political rights to taxation. Furthermore, it does not correctly address a mischief that the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 aimed to address, namely a clarification of the rules on party donations.
	It is irrational to us that, having been presented with so many strong reasons why these amendments should not be passed, the Government are steam-rolling the matter through at almost 10 o'clock tonight. As I have said previously in the House, this is legislating on the hoof and we do not much like it.
	There is a technical difficulty in trying to assess an individual's permissibility by reference to their tax status because, by its very nature, it is both changeable and retrospective. These new amendments are concerned with the individual's tax status in the current tax year. I need not remind the House that the Secretary of State for Justice has said:
	It is...almost impossible to establish somebody's tax status, and particularly residence status, in the middle of a tax year.-[ Official Report, 13 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 61.]
	Can the Minister explain how these provisions will work in practice and how the Government intend to regulate and enforce them?
	Tonight the Government have come the full 180 degrees and completed their spectacular U-turn on the provisions. In brief, if I were to ask whether these amendments improve the drafting after the Government created such an appalling mess last week, I would say yes: on the Government's own terms they make bad law work better. But do these amendments attempt to answer the questions that we raised in order to provide effective, fair and workable legislation? No they do not.
	As my noble Friend Lord Bates confirmed in the other place this afternoon, by tabling these amendments, the Government have created an anomaly in our electoral and tax law. A British citizen based overseas will be able to vote in our elections and can even stand in our elections, yet he cannot make a donation over £7,500 to a political party. The implementation of this bad law is going to be difficult given the technical issues and complexities involved, and we insist that the Government do not activate these provisions without the full review of their application that will be required.

David Howarth: Unlike the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly), I am pleased with the progress that the proposal has made through the two Houses, ever since an alliance of Liberal Democrats, Labour Back Benchers and Cross Benchers in the Lords put through an amendment in the name of Lord Campbell-Savours, against the wishes of the Front-Bench teams of the main two parties. It is true that what we are seeing is ping-pong, with the Government instigating both sides of the game, rather like  The Beano character Billy Whizz, who was able to go around the table knocking the ball back to himself and playing his own game.

David Heath: Or Forrest Gump.

David Howarth: Indeed.
	There remain two particular issues about the workability, scope and breadth of the proposals that I would like to raise. I tabled a series of amendments in a different motion that I understand has not been selected. Nevertheless, there are still important issues for the Government to respond on.
	The first is a change in the definition of the situation in which a declaration has to be made about tax status. The Government's first attempt at definition talked about someone who causes a donation to be made. In the amendments that the Government then tabled in the Lords, that was changed to an individual making a donation. That seems a much narrower definition.
	There is a problem that was identified originally by the Government: these proposals do not in terms prevent donations from being made by companies. A lot of the controversy about large donations from abroad has been about companies making donations. It seemed that the Government were attempting to deal with that problem by using the phrase
	causing a donation to be made.
	That phrase seemed at least to some of us to be applicable to the situation where an individual who controls a company caused that company to make a donation. However, in the new definition proposed by the Lords to us tonight, only an individual making a donation is covered. The use of the word individual seems to rule out the possibility of these provisions covering company donations.
	I know the Government will say that in the situation where an individual gives money to a company with the intention of the company then giving that money to a party, that might count as the individual making the donation, but that is a very narrowly drawn situation which is rather unlikely to happen. What is more likely to happen is for an individual who controls a company to cause the company to make a donation, and the Government seem to have ruled out any control over that particular possibility. I regret that, if it is, indeed, the Government's intention.

Jonathan Djanogly: The hon. Gentleman has just gone on at some length as to how this is applicable to companies, but it is my understanding that it never had anything whatever to do with companies. The Minister might like to say something about that in his winding-up speech.

David Howarth: Well, that is an issue that the Minister has to sort out. My belief is that if the original phraseology-causing a donation to be made-had been used, that could have applied to a situation where an individual who controls a company caused the company to make a donation. That would have been covered.

Martin Linton: Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that the Electoral Commission is looking into this particular point right now in relation to Bearwood Securities, to see whether that company is being caused to make a donation which would be against the existing political parties Act even without the very good amendment that is now before the House?

David Howarth: The hon. Gentleman raises the example that is in all our minds.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. May I inform the hon. Gentleman that the Speaker has selected his motion for debate?

David Howarth: I am glad to hear that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I should explain that the amendments in my name simply carry into legislative effect the points I am making in my speech.
	The second issue is to do with commencement. When will this law come into effect? Under the amendments in the form in which they have come back to us from the Lords, the provisions before us come into effect only when the Minister makes an order, which means they may never be brought into operation. My amendment on this issue would change that, so that these provisions would come into effect immediately the Bill receives Royal Assent.
	I am raising this matter now because of a story that appeared in  The Observer on Sunday about donors to the Labour party who turn out to be non-doms-non-domiciled. The headline read, Tycoons pledge to stop bankrolling Labour if 'non-dom' tax bill passes. That is a reference to the Bill before us now. The paper gave a number of examples, including Lord Paul and Sir Gulam Noon, who, according to the story, might stop giving donations to the Labour party if the provision before us is brought into force.
	It would be a very great shame indeed if the Government were getting cold feet about this provision because they had discovered its effects on the Labour party. The principle here is one that is meant to apply to all parties, and it is one that will affect all parties. It is a good principle: those who have distanced themselves from this country by being non-resident and non-domiciled in their tax affairs should not be allowed to influence the votes of others through making vast donations.

Andrew Robathan: I am listening with great interest to what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but was there not someone who went to prison called Michael Brown-that might not be the right name-who gave a great deal of money to the Liberal Democrats, and was he not offshore somewhere and not paying tax in this country?

David Howarth: As I have said, the principle is one that might well apply to all parties. That is why in principle it should apply across the board. If hon. Gentlemen-they are all gentlemen on the Conservative Benches-just want to use this legislation in a partisan way, then they cannot be surprised if other parties take the opportunity to use the legislation in a partisan way against them.
	I simply ask the Government to put on the record precisely when they expect to bring these provisions into force and, specifically, whether they intend to bring them into force before May next year.

Lembit �pik: The debates about representation and taxation have been well rehearsed, so I wish to make a single point that I sought to make in intervention on the Minister. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) has exactly underlined the key issue. To those people who agree with the spirit of what is being attempted by this legislation it seems obvious that there is an opportunity to use loopholes to evade its intention. My question to the Minister is this: how does he believe that he can prevent the evasion of this legislation by those who use alternative means? Such means have been outlined by my hon. Friend and do not need repeating by me. It appears to me that those who are hellbent on avoiding the spirit of this legislation can still do so, for example, by using a company, as my hon. Friend has just highlighted.
	Although these provisions may be an improvement, the Government have nevertheless probably left enough space to enable those who are absolutely determined to continue their current practices to do so, from a distance away from the United Kingdom. We can legislate for the spirit but we cannot legislate against bad faith without doing some more. I fear that even with the best of intentions, the road to hell will continue to be paved by bad donations.

Michael Wills: It has been a short and interesting debate. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) got extremely indignant about these provisions, although I note that his party did not vote against them when they first came before this House. I shall be interested to see whether his indignation leads him to vote against provisions that he said are an improvement on last time, given that his party did not vote against them, either here or in the other place. As always, I am interested in his contribution and I shall be interested to see whether he takes this through to a vote.
	The hon. Gentleman asked one specific question about the tax year definition. We recognise that in many cases residence and domicile are, in essence-or at least in large part-retrospective terms, so there are practical difficulties in linking the restriction to the current year. However, setting the qualifying point as the preceding year equally contains practical difficulties-we have reflected on that-and, in addition, would create a somewhat odd position, whereby a person who at the time of a donation knows themselves to be a non-resident and non-domiciled could still donate.
	Although we recognise the difficulty for individuals and parties of a potential uncertainty about someone's tax status during the tax year, we have concluded that if a person wants to make a large political donation-in other words, one of more than £7,500-it is not unreasonable to require them to take steps to ascertain their current status. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs already publishes guidance to help such people ascertain their status and, if they are in doubt, they could of course make a donation below the threshold.
	The hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) asked two specific questions, one of which was about causing donations, and I understand his concerns. May I say to him, distinguished lawyer that he is, that they were based on a misunderstanding of the intention behind the original amendments? The amendments tabled by Lord Campbell-Savours sought to require a declaration from an individual who makes a donation. We sought to achieve the same effect, and it has never been our intention, as the hon. Member for Huntingdon pointed out, to place a restriction on donations made through companies by these standards. Notwithstanding that, I am not even sure that the hon. Member for Cambridge is correct to say that if we used cause in the sense that he would like us to use it, it would capture companies. Even if he were correct, it is not the Government's policy to do that.
	The hon. Member for Cambridge also asked when the arrangement would come into effect. As everyone who has spoken so far has mentioned, these are complex clauses that raise considerable practical difficulties. It is the intention of this House and the other place that the spirit of these clauses should be put into effect, and that is what we are endeavouring to do, in keeping with our longstanding policy of pursuing consensus on these matters. Given their complexity, we are practically unable to commence provision before the summer of 2010, so we are not proposing to commence the arrangements before then. Equally, we are not envisaging undue delay after that date. I hope that that will give the hon. Gentleman some comfort about our intentions in this matter.
	The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) made a brief but powerful contribution about evasion and he said that what is being proposed would not prevent those who were absolutely determined to evade the provisions. He is right: there is no legislation that will make it certain that we can prevent people from evading who are determined to do so, but we have made the intention behind these provisions clear here and in the other place, and we expect all political parties and donors to abide by that.
	 Question put and agreed to.

Business without Debate
	  
	Defence

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
	That the draft Armed Forces (Court Martial) Rules 2009, which were laid before this House on 8 May, be approved .-(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
	That the draft Armed Forces (Civilian Courts Dealing with Service Offences) (Modification of the Criminal Justice Act 2003) Regulations 2009, which were laid before this House on 8 May, be approved. -(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
	That the draft Court Martial (Prosecution Appeals) Order 2009, which was laid before this House on 2 June, be approved. -(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Hallmark

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
	That the draft Hallmarking Act 1973 (Application to Palladium) Order 2009, which was laid before this House on 24 June, be approved. -(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Regulatory reform

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 18(1)),
	That the draft Legislative Reform (Limited Partnerships) Order 2009, which was laid before this House on 2 June, be approved. -(Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons

Mr. Speaker: I advise the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay).

Barbara Keeley: I beg to move,
	(1) That a Select Committee be appointed to consider and make recommendations on the following matters:
	(a) the appointment of members and chairmen of select committees,
	(b) the appointment of the Chairman and Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means;
	(c) scheduling business in the House;
	(d) enabling the public to initiate debates and proceedings in the House; and
	(e) such other matters as appear to the Committee to be closely connected with the matters set out above,
	and to report on these matters by 13 November 2009;
	(2) That the Committee also consider such other matters as may be referred to it from time to time;
	(3) That the Committee consist of eighteen Members;
	(4) That Mr Graham Allen, Mr Clive Betts, Mr Graham Brady, Mr David Clelland, Mr David Drew, Natascha Engel, Dr Evan Harris, David Howarth, Mr Michael Jack, Mr Greg Knight, Mr Elfyn Llwyd, Mr Chris Mullin, Dr Nick Palmer, Martin Salter, Dr Phyllis Starkey, Mr Andrew Tyrie, Dr Tony Wright and Sir George Young be members of the Committee;
	(5) That Dr Tony Wright be Chairman of the Committee;
	(6) That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House; to adjourn from place to place, to report from time to time and to appoint specialist advisers;
	(7) That this Order be a Standing Order of the House until the end of the present Parliament.
	On 10 June, the Prime Minister announced in a statement to the House his support for the proposal by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), the Chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee, to set up a new Committee to consider reform of the procedures of the House of Commons. The motion before the House today gives effect to that proposal by establishing a Committee to make recommendations on the appointment of members and Chairmen of Select Committees, the scheduling of business in the House, and enabling the public to initiate debates and proceedings of the House.
	This Committee will be an important step at looking at how the reform of parliamentary procedure can achieve stronger accountability of the Government to Parliament through a larger role for Back-Bench Members and the wider public. There have been earlier versions of this motion which attracted amendments. Because we are keen to proceed on the basis of consensus for this Committee, we withdrew the motion in order to see if we could reach a compromise with the hon. Members who tabled those amendments. Most recently, we accepted the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) and this is now part of the motion before the House today, at paragraph (1)(b).

Christopher Chope: I am grateful to the Minister for accepting my amendment, which had cross-party support on an important issue. However, the explanatory memorandum has not been updated to reflect the fact that my amendment has been accepted by the Government. Can the Minister explain that, or put it right?

Barbara Keeley: I am sure that the issue was shortage of time, and I apologise for any shortcomings in the explanatory memorandum.

Greg Knight: The Minister has been forthright with the House in indicating that she agrees with the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) and she has incorporated it in the motion, but can she indicate to the House her attitude and that of the Government to amendment (a)?

Barbara Keeley: I shall come to that question in a moment, if Members will give me a chance.
	As we have reached agreement on a number of issues, I hope that the Committee can report quickly so that the proposed reforms can be considered for implementation early in the next Session. The three areas originally put forward for specific consideration are in the motion under paragraph (1):
	(a) the appointment of members and chairmen of select committees...
	(c) scheduling business in the House
	and
	(d) enabling the public to initiate debates and proceedings in the House.
	We have made specific concessions in response to two of the amendments tabled to the original motion, and I shall speak about them briefly.
	First, we have dropped the reference to timetabling non-Government business. I accept that it is likely in practice that any changes to the arrangements for scheduling non-Government business could have an impact on Government business, which is why we felt it sensible to accept that amendment. We remain firmly of the view that the Government of the day should have adequate opportunities to put their business to the House and, subject to the will of the House, to get their business through. I hope the Committee will accept that as an indication of the kind of recommendation that the Government are likely to view favourably.
	Secondly, I know that some prospective members of the Committee were concerned about its terms of reference being drawn too narrowly. We have therefore inserted in paragraph (1) new subsection (d), which will allow the Committee to consider other matters that are closely connected with the main subjects referred to it-[Hon. Members: It's paragraph (e).] Okay. Our intention is that it should be a contingency provision to allow the Committee to consider consequential changes to areas of procedure that flow naturally from its principal recommendations.

Peter Bottomley: The Minister confirms that since another sub-paragraph was included, paragraph (1)(d) has become (1)(e), and I think that is what she is referring to. Does she agree that it would have been slightly more elegant if the Committee had been allowed to elect its own Chairman?

Barbara Keeley: We are talking about a proposal from my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright).
	I shall recommend that the House resist the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). First, it involves a substantial issue in its own right and I do not think it would be wise to add further items to the Committee's agenda for the very short period before it reports. More importantly, the proposal for Ministers in another place to appear before this House has implications for the work of both Houses and that is, therefore, not an area in which a Select Committee of one House could come to a set of recommendations that would be acceptable to both Houses.

Mark Harper: I am interested in the fact that the Minister says there will be only a short period, because it seems to me that there are four months before the Committee is due to report. We do not believe all that nonsense in the papers about going on holiday for 82 days: the Committee is perfectly able to sit during the summer recess and reach its recommendations. Given that the Committee is due to report by 13 November-a specific date five days before the state opening of Parliament-can the Minister confirm that if it makes specific recommendations the Government will consider them and put proposals before Parliament in the Queen's Speech so that they can be passed in the new Session of Parliament and take effect at the earliest opportunity?

Barbara Keeley: I very much hope that the work of the Committee will bring fruit in terms of reform in the next Session.
	Finally, I have been impressed by the strength of feeling on both sides of the House-as is evident here tonight-in support of the work of the new Committee. I hope that the Committee can conduct a focused inquiry that will bear fruit in terms of reform, and I commend the motion to the House.

Shailesh Vara: Many Members present agree that the business of the House can and should be planned and handled much better than it is at present. Many also agree that we could improve the existing Select Committee system. There is general consensus on the need to do more to re-engage the Commons with the public, particularly given the low esteem in which Parliament is currently held. For our part, Conservative Members have been proposing such changes for quite some time. Our party's democracy taskforce-
	 The debate stood adjourned (Standing Order No. 9(3)).

Mr. Speaker: Order. I apologise for having to interrupt the shadow Deputy Leader of the House and for interrupting the flow of his eloquence in the process. We will return to him before very long. At this point, the House will understand, the appointed hour of 10 o'clock having been reached, there are two motions with which we need to deal before we can continue the debate. The first is on the subject of deferred divisions, and it may be for the convenience of the House simply to explain that the motion about to be moved by the Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household will be moved in moderately amended form, in recognition of the fact that the motions relating to Defence and to Hallmark in the names of the Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills have already been addressed.

deferred divisions

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 41A(3)),
	That, at this day's sitting, Standing Order No. 41A (Deferred divisions) shall not apply to the Motion in the name of Ms Harriet Harman relating to the Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons.- (Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.

Business of the House

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 15),
	That, at this day's sitting, (1) consideration of any Lords Messages that may be received and (2) the Motion in the name of Ms Harriet Harman relating to the Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons may be proceeded with, though opposed, until any hour.- (Helen Jones.)
	 Question agreed to.
	 Main Question again proposed.

Shailesh Vara: To recap, broadly speaking, Members are of the view that there ought to be some review of the Select Committee system and the procedures of the House.
	Conservative Members have been talking about the issue for quite some time. Our party's democracy taskforce, chaired by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), has made several suggestions to re-energise proceedings in the House. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has specifically called for more powers to be returned to Parliament and, in particular, for Committee Chairmen to be selected by Back Benchers and for Committee proceedings on Bills to be free from the influence of the Whips. That is where much of the detailed work is done, and it is felt that Back Benchers should have freedom to operate on their own merits, rather than be pressured by Whips. I welcome the fact that all those matters fall under the remit of the proposed Committee. I know that Members serving on the Committee-certainly Conservative Members-will be pressing for such constructive reforms to help rebuild our parliamentary system.
	It is also right that the new Select Committee should be time-limited. That will ensure that it does not supplant the role of the Procedure Committee, and will concentrate minds on the limited time available in which to draw conclusions and report back.
	I am pleased that the Government accepted the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope). Given the delays and lack of proper consultation in the run-up to the tabling of the motion, it was perhaps the least that the Government could do in the circumstances.
	The amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), raises a very valid point. The recent growth in the number of Cabinet Ministers, and junior Ministers too, in the other place, and the ever-expanding titles of the First Secretary of State make the subject extremely topical. There is justifiable concern in all parts of the House about how we can ensure that the Government are properly and effectively held to account. No doubt Members will have their own views on the amendment itself, and it will perhaps be for the Chairman of the Committee to suggest that the question of making Members of the other House accountable should be looked at in another way. I suspect that given the time constraint-although I hear what my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper) said earlier-and the fact that the Committee has no members from the other House, the issue may need further consideration.
	It is also worth pointing out that the way in which the motion has been handled beggars belief. It is a simple motion that is supposed to improve the efficiency of the House, yet the manner in which it has been handled has been slipshod, to put it mildly. The Prime Minister said in his statement in June that the Government would
	work with a special parliamentary commission.-[ Official Report, 10 June 2009; Vol. 493, c. 797.]
	Given the number of existing Select Committees well qualified to deal with the issue, such as the Modernisation Committee and the Procedure Committee, it is regrettable that yet another Committee has had to be set up. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Prime Minister did not consult anybody in advance on a matter that is basically House business. All that seemed to be of concern to him was his press release.
	Then there was the indecisiveness. Less than 24 hours after being tabled, the motion was withdrawn. On 26 June, the Deputy Leader of the House told us, as is recorded in column 967 of  Hansard, that that was done so that there could be consultation and the motion could proceed on a consensual basis. Given that two weeks had passed since the Prime Minister's statement, there had already been plenty of time for consultation. Clearly the Government preferred not to be consensual at that point.
	Only now are we finally getting the chance to debate the establishment of a Select Committee on the reform of the House, some seven weeks after the Prime Minister's announcement, in which he spoke of proceeding with these matters as an urgent imperative. We are now faced with having to debate this important matter after 10 o'clock on the day before the summer recess. I very much hope that the new Committee will take that as an example of how proceedings in this House should not operate in future.

David Heath: I very much welcome the fact that we are finally debating the motion, albeit in an amended form. However, the revolutionary zeal with which the original proposal was made has rather evaporated in the mean time. I hoped that we would have a genuinely root-and-branch reform of the way this House works, because many things need to be addressed if we are to make it more effective and more relevant, and work better for the interests of our constituents. I thought that the proposal for the new Committee might be a vehicle for some genuinely radical reforms of procedures. It may still be that, but the way in which the Government have gone about it has been extraordinarily disappointing and, in the end, rather enervating.
	Not to consult about the original motion in advance indicates everything that we need to know about how the Government do their business. The motion was quintessentially a House matter, where we needed support from all parts of the House, yet there it was, appearing on the Order Paper at 24 hours' notice, as much as to say: Like it or lump it-this is the way it is going to be done. When some of us tabled amendments immediately on reading the motion, because we realised that it would not do the job that was expected of it, it was withdrawn, so we were left without the very Committee that we were all so keen should be set up.

Barbara Keeley: As I have already said, the motion was withdrawn to allow for consultation. It is rather churlish of Opposition Members to deny that consultation. We withdrew the motion so that we could incorporate ideas and amendments into it.

David Heath: The motion was withdrawn because it was incompetent, because it did not have the support of Members in all parts of the House and because, had my amendment been put to the vote, it would have been supported by Members in all parts of the House and the Government would have been defeated. That is why the Government withdraw the motion in the first instance. All that could have been avoided if they had simply picked up the phone to a few people from all parts of the House and said, What do you think of this motion? Do you think it would do what you hope it would? However, I am afraid that organising that proved to be beyond the abilities of the business managers of the Government party.

Bernard Jenkin: I understand the hon. Gentleman's frustration; indeed, I signed his amendment. It would have been refreshing, in a way, if the Government had allowed his amendment to be debated and then accepted it or been defeated. My only problem with his approach is that there is a tendency on the part of Front Benchers to feel that if they make a few phone calls, there has been consultation. There are 646 Members of this House who often feel left out of such consultations, and I regard the to-ing and fro-ing on the Order Paper as a rather refreshing change. I would not dismiss the generosity of the Government in the way that they eventually handled this.

David Heath: Eventually is the operative word. I was at pains not to say two phone calls because that would indeed have been the usual channels deciding between themselves what was right for Back Benchers. Instead a lot of people who had expressed an interest in the matter could have been involved at an early stage in what was proposed, and we could have had a consensual motion before the House.
	I do not decry the fact that the Government eventually took away their motion and incorporated my amendment; it would be extraordinarily bad-tempered and unpleasant of me not to welcome that. What I find inexplicable, though, is that having agreed that that was what was going to happen, it took the Government from 26 June to this very day to find any time whatsoever in the parliamentary timetable to enable the motion to be debated so that we could make a decision. Are they really saying that in nearly four weeks we could not have found an hour and a half-that is all that it would have been needed-to debate this matter and get it through? Of course we could have done that. One of the paradoxes that several Members have commented on in recent weeks is that this motion is about trying to organise our business in a way that suits the House rather than the Executive, yet we have been prevented from debating it for three or four weeks because the Executive decided that the House could not have the time to discuss its business. That is a fundamental flaw in the Government's approach.

Mark Harper: The hon. Gentleman is being overly generous to the Government in saying that they allowed this evening's debate. They allowed it to happen only because if they had not done so, and the motion had been objected to again today and tomorrow, they would not have got their business-because they were forced into it, not because they wanted us to debate the motion.

David Heath: My difficulty with what the hon. Gentleman says is that this is not the Government's business but ours-it is the business of the House in reforming itself and making itself more relevant. I am trying to express my frustration at the fact that this debate has been held up by our not being allowed the modest amount of time that would have been required to have it at a much earlier stage.
	The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) could have had his Committee up and running-it could have been doing its work and, in due course, have reported on everything that we wanted it to report on. Instead, it has been frustrated by the lack of time and the objections of Members. I do not object to the fact that the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) shouted Object every time that the motion came up, because he had every right to do so if he wanted to debate the matter; what was wrong was the fact that no time was then given to enable the debate to take place. That was entirely in the hands of the Government.

David Drew: rose-

David Heath: I was trying to be very brief, but of course I give way.

David Drew: If the usual channels cannot discuss this, what do they discuss?

David Heath: I am not a member of the usual channels. I do not know who they comprise of and I have no idea of how they reach their decisions-all I know is that they often bypass the wishes of most Members of this House. That is what is wrong, and that is why we need a proper business Committee, which I hope will be determined to be the right course of action. That Committee should set out the business of the House in a way that facilitates debate, ensures that we deal with the issues that are important to Members of this House, and does not frustrate the Government's business-that would not be the purpose of a well-organised Committee-but allows the House to debate properly, in good time, the things that are considered to be important and that Members feel that they need to express their constituents' opinions on.

Alan Beith: Was my hon. Friend not worried when the Government, in their presentation of their reason for permitting the widening of the motion, said that the consideration of non-Government business might impact on Government business? They did not recognise that the House as a whole had a legitimate interest in the issue of how effectively Government business is considered. Although the Government have the right to bring their business before the House, the House must have the capacity to decide how it can most effectively examine it.

David Heath: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, that is the crux of the matter. The question is whether we are a self-confident legislature that organises its own time, hears what the Government have to say and gives the Government the opportunity to put forward their legislation while not artificially avoiding the opportunities for them to get their business through. However, at the same time, we must be prepared to do justice to the people we represent by debating in this Chamber what we want to debate, not what the Executive feel fit for us to debate-and, more importantly, what they feel is fit for us not to debate, which is the situation at the moment.

Nicholas Winterton: While I entirely agree with the comments made by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the only way that this House can achieve what he has set out is to take control of Standing Orders? That is critical if we are to do what this House wants.

David Heath: I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. First we take Standing Orders, then we take business. The two are consecutive and, to some extent, simultaneous. Without one, we cannot control the other. That is what this debate is all about-it is about this House getting up off its knees and reclaiming its position as the Parliament of the people of this country, which is able to control its own business. This position is not anti-Government of any description; it is simply a pro-Parliament position. Parliament must have its say, and must be able to do so on its own terms. I hope that that is what the Committee will enable it to do and that it will get to work in the very near future.
	I am pleased with the specific amendments that have widened the reference to the scheduling of business to include all business in the House, so that the Committee can consider other matters that appear to it to be relevant. I am perfectly content that the amendment originally tabled by the hon. Member for Christchurch has now been incorporated into the terms of reference.
	As for the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), we will hear his reasoning in a few moments. I know perfectly well the point that he is making, because it is a point that I have made from these Benches, too. It is simply not acceptable to have junior messengers sent to this House to tell us what the policy is in major Departments of State, particularly when one Department of State appears to have swallowed up whole other Departments within the machinery of government without our ever being given a rationale for why that should be. It seems right that we should find a way in which a Secretary of State appointed by this Government can answer directly to this House. Whether it is right for this Committee to do that in its first consideration, I do not know. That will be a matter for the Committee to decide when it considers its priorities. I note that the reporting date is 13 November, but I am absolutely clear and confident that that matter needs to be addressed. The amendment is as good a vehicle as any other for addressing it, and I look forward to hearing what the hon. Gentleman has to say.
	Given that 13 November has propinquity, as has been pointed out, to the Queen's Speech, I wonder what will happen if we prorogue early. Perhaps the Deputy Leader of the House can tell us and can make it absolutely clear that the Committee's report will be considered by the House at the first opportunity, that it will form the basis of proposals and that its recommendations will be put to the House. I do not mean we should consider those recommendations that the Leader of the House thinks might be appropriate, but that the recommendations of the Committee should be put to the House without being redacted. We want no blank spaces or black lines on the recommendations of the Committee when we consider them. When they come before the House, I hope that there will be a genuinely free vote so that every Member can exercise their own judgment and discretion about how we operate in this Chamber and will not be subject to inappropriate pressure from the Whips, the payroll or anybody else. On that basis, I support the motion.

Andrew MacKinlay: I beg to move amendment (a), line 3, at end insert-
	'( ) arrangements for Ministers who are members of the House of Lords to respond in this House to questions for oral answer and to pilot legislative proposals through this House on matters within their Ministerial responsibilities.'.
	I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for selecting the amendment because it is important to me and many other Members who have, in the past, expressed support for the principles in it.
	The amendment does not tell the Committee that it should allow Ministers who are Members of the House of Lords to appear here, but asks it to examine the proposal. I am dismayed and disappointed by the Leader of the House's refusal to accept my amendments, especially when she accepts those of the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), which are doubtless very good. I wonder what I have done to offend Front Benchers. I emphasise that the amendment involves a reference rather than an instruction to the Committee.
	I am surprised because after the most recent Government reshuffle, I know of many hon. Members-particularly but not exclusively Labour Members-who were dismayed by the volume of Ministers who are now in another place. Some hon. Members were appalled by that. Personally, I simply want to have access to the Ministers-those who are in Government and have Executive authority. There is a powerful case for claiming that Ministers do not have to be members of the legislature; the important principle is that the legislature has access to them. Perhaps that is to go too far tonight, but I simply want to probe and examine the conduct and stewardship of Departments by Ministers, whether they are in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Probing and examining the Executive is one of our primary duties.

Mark Harper: Given that I suspect that the hon. Gentleman's view is shared by many hon. Members, does he plan to take the temperature of the House and press the amendment to a Division? He would get much support if he did.

Andrew MacKinlay: If hon. Members will join me in the Lobby and help me with Tellers, I will be pleased to press the amendment. Even if I were not able to persuade the House tonight because of party loyalties and so on, it would send a definite signal to the Government that the matter needs to be addressed and to many Committees of the House that might have an opportunity to examine it. However, I hope that I would win. I appeal to hon. Members to reflect on the fact that we are considering House of Commons business, which is our property.
	The Deputy Leader of the House said that the matter was also the business of another place. However, I know Members of the House of Lords who share my view. I suspect that if one of our colleagues in the other place raised the matter there, Baroness Royall would say, I can't accept this because it might offend Members of the House of Commons. That is nonsense. If the matter were referred to the Committee, the House of Lords would clearly be consulted. If it collectively had an overriding objection, it would communicate it to the House of Commons. However, I believe that reference to the Committee would be welcomed in another place because it would thus also have access to Ministers, who are the architects of legislation that has to pass through the House of Lords, but is simply dealt with by somebody called a Lord or Lady in Waiting.

Peter Bone: Surely the Deputy Leader of the House fears nothing because the First Secretary, the noble Lord Mandelson, would be delighted to get back into this Chamber.

Andrew MacKinlay: I am coming to him. I invite particularly, but not exclusively Labour Members with long memories to reflect on the fact that when some of them entered politics-I did so a long time ago; some did so much more recently and have been through various parties, moving from left to right, but we will not go there-the Labour party under Hugh Gaitskell and later under the Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, deprecated the fact that the Foreign Secretary was in the House of Lords. Lord Hailsham had a significant science portfolio at the same time. When Ted Heath became Prime Minister, Alec Home returned to the House of Lords as Foreign Secretary. More recently Michael Foot, and I believe some Members who are present, derided the fact that Lord Carrington was a Cabinet Minister in the House of Lords. I invite Labour Members to be consistent, not to waver, because they have deprecated this situation in the past.
	You will recall, Mr. Speaker, that there was also a man called Lord Young in Margaret Thatcher's Government-the man who brought her solutions. He had a very senior portfolio, not dissimilar to Lord Mandelson's. It was called something different, but basically it meant he was responsible for trade and industry. His membership of the House of Lords was deprecated by the Labour Opposition, who said we should have access to him. That is in the living memory of some Members who are sitting here tonight and of some who are absent despite the fact that they have been anointed and appear on the motion as members of the Committee. People need to reflect on that.
	Now we have a new invention called GOATs-Ministers in a Government of all the talents. We have had a man called Digby Jones, a Lord Carter, a Lord Ryde Pier of Spittle, or Spithead, or whatever it is, and Malloch-Brown, who I incidentally thought was a breath of fresh air. [Hon. Members: Gone.] But he is gone.
	As well as those GOATs, who are here today and gone tomorrow, there are some junior Ministers in the House of Lords whose names I do not know and whom, as a Labour MP, I have never met. I think that it was just before you became Speaker, Mr. Speaker, in the last Prime Minister's Question Time under Speaker Martin, that I referred to junior Ministers who act in the other House for the Secretary of State-the architect of legislation and the person who presides over the Government's policy-as superior parrots. I did not mean that disparagingly, but I was illustrating the point that when a junior Minister is acting for a Secretary of State who is not in the same House, all they can do is repeat what has been handed down to them in a brief. They cannot exercise discretion and say, We will accept that amendment, or We will come back to it on Report, because they are frightened of doing so. It would improve our legislative process if the architect of a piece of legislation were to pilot it through both Houses.
	That is quite apart from parliamentary questions, where even more so, the more junior the Minister, the more nervous he or she is about saying anything constructive. I appeal to colleagues that to consider the matter would be a common-sense approach.

Lynne Jones: Would that not require the Prime Minister and Lord Mandelson to pilot every Bill?

Andrew MacKinlay: Not so, because this works both ways. There are still a number of distinguished Ministers in the House of Commons, and they would be able to go to the House of Lords. There are also some very significant Ministers in the House of Lords. Until a few days ago our Minister with responsibility for the UN and the middle east was Lord Malloch-Brown, and I understand that Lord West of Spithead is the Security Minister. Colleagues and comrades should pause and think about it: this is the elected House of Commons, and we do not have access to the Minister who is in charge of national security. Surely that is both breathtaking and an abdication of responsibility by this place.

William Cash: Given that the hon. Gentleman refers to senior parrots, would he therefore characterise Lord Mandelson as a senior cockatoo?

Andrew MacKinlay: I do not want to go down that road, but one thing that I acknowledge is that Lord Mandelson could certainly cope in this place. He did before, and he could do so again as a Lord. However, I postulate the view that there are some Ministers in the House of Lords who could not cope here. They would not stand up to the grilling that this House still gives Ministers on occasion. They would not be able to cope, and that is not satisfactory. They are being kept from us, and some of them would not be prepared to be Ministers here, because they would burst into tears if they came here. That is the reality. They would not pass muster.
	The Minister tells us that there was consultation. I was waiting for her to say My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock could have come along, but she did not. In a way, I did consult, and I am disappointed that my point was not taken on board. If Members look at the  Hansard of 17 June, they will see that I put the issue to the Prime Minister at Question Time. With characteristic precision, and without indecision, the Prime Minister agreed with me, and told me to refer the matter to the Committee that we are discussing. That was his reply. If the Prime Minister says to me that the issue should come before the Committee, it is not unreasonable to assume that the wonderful Ministers would put that into the wording of the motion.

Mark Harper: I sense a way out of the dilemma: now that the hon. Gentleman has put it to Labour Members that his amendment implicitly carries the endorsement of the Prime Minister, he should test the will of the House. He will be even more successful than he would have been five minutes ago.

Andrew MacKinlay: As hon. Members know, it is put about that the Prime Minister is indecisive, but that is a travesty; on that occasion he was decisive-he told me to refer the matter to the Committee, but Ministers still have not picked the matter up.
	I come to my last point. The fact is that the proposal is not rocket science. In the vast majority of parliamentary bicameral legislatures around the world, Ministers appear in both Houses, arguing for their legislation, and defending their stewardship of their Department. That is true of many, but not all, Parliaments that are modelled on Westminster throughout the Commonwealth. I am a bit of an anorak-a student-when it comes to Irish political history. The Republic of Ireland very much still has a Westminster-style constitution. The Northern Ireland House of Commons and Senate, which endured from 1920 to 1972, had, until 1972, a provision whereby Ministers appeared in both Houses. Today, Ministers appear in both Houses in the Oireachtas of Ireland. Dail Eireann Ministers appear in the Senead, and on the few occasions when there have been Senead Ministers, they have appeared in the Dail Eireann. The proposal is not world-shattering, and it does not require lengthy consideration. Why do we not just do it? The answer is: because this place is so deeply conservative.
	What causes me the most regret is that the most conservative element, when it comes to change and constitutional innovation, are my party's Front Benchers. I could burst into tears with the frustration of it. It really is bad. I invite all hon. Members, left right and centre, to join me in the Lobby and to support my modest, sensible amendment, which does not say that such a change will take place; it just says that the Committee will consider it.

George Young: Not for the first time, the House is indebted to the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) for raising a serious constitutional issue. He is right to say that over the past few years, in Government, there has been a shift in the centre of gravity of decision making from this House to the other place. That shift has been focused in the Treasury and the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. That raises issues of accountability, which he touched on with his normal frankness and candour.
	I should like to qualify what the hon. Gentleman said about precedents. I think that I am right in saying that when my party had Cabinet Ministers in the House of Lords, there was a Cabinet Minister in the Commons who answered with them or for them. In the case of Lord Young-no relation at all-my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) was in the Cabinet and answered for the Department in the Commons. The criticism that I would make of the present Government is that they have not replicated that pattern of having Cabinet-rank Ministers in the Commons, accountable to this House.
	I have a lot of sympathy with the point that the hon. Member for Thurrock raised, and we need to look at it. My only reservation, given the amount of time that the proposed Committee has already lost, is whether we can do justice to the important issue that he raises in the remaining time available to us, or whether the subject is of such importance that it deserves separate scrutiny of its own, so that it can be looked at in depth. If it is tagged on to the responsibilities already proposed, we may not be able to do the subject justice.
	In my brief contribution, I want to make three points. First, we should be grateful for small mercies: just before the House rises for the recess, the Government have at last found time for a debate, so that we can get this show on the road. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) pointed out, it would have been perverse if a Committee set up to make better use of the time of the House could not start working because the Government had denied it the time to do so. I am glad that we are now going to look at this. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) said, the democracy taskforce, on which I have served, has been brimming with ideas that I hope will be fed into the new Committee.
	The Deputy Leader did not really explain why we need a new Committee. We have a Select Committee on Procedure, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight), and a Select Committee on Modernisation. The latter cannot be described as being overworked, because it has not met for more than a year. The terms of reference for the proposed Committee fall neatly within those of either the Procedure Committee or the Modernisation Committee. The Deputy Leader did not explain why we need a new vehicle, which has had to be constructed and assembled, causing some seven or eight weeks' delay, when we have two vehicles already on the road and ready to go. They could have started work on this process immediately. Indeed, the Procedure Committee has already looked at one of the subjects that are to be addressed by the new Committee-namely, engagement with the public and e-petitions.
	My ingenious solution-which I am sorry the Government did not adopt-was to dismiss as Chairman of the Modernisation Committee the Leader of the House, who has no business being Chairman of a Select Committee of the House, and parachuting in the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) as its new Chairman. That would have saved everyone a lot of time, we would have benefited from his energy and ideas, and we could have started work some seven weeks ago. But that idea was not acceptable to the Government.
	My last point is about the delay. We have lost about half the sitting time of the new Committee because of the delay in setting it up. There was an inelegance-to put it at its mildest-in the lack of consultation and in the delay in getting the show on the road. We are now going to have to work at double time to catch up the time that we have lost. We are also going to have to sit during the recess. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase has set a cracking pace for his Committee, in setting the agenda and convening a huge number of meetings.
	The real test will be what happens to the Committee's work when it has reported. I have to say that the signals over the past seven weeks, given the difficulties we have faced getting this far, do not augur well. I hope that the Minister will give us a specific commitment that, before we rise for the Christmas recess, there will be a substantive debate in Government time, with a free vote on both sides of the House, on all the recommendations of the Committee. That would give us time to resolve the matter and get the new machinery up and running in the tail end of this Parliament. I hope that the Minister will understand that the mood of the House is one of impatience and of anxiety to make progress, and I hope that when she replies to the debate-which could happen tomorrow, given the number of Members who want to speak-she will give a very positive response to the points that I and other right hon. and hon. Members have made.

Mark Fisher: I congratulate the Government on at last giving us time to discuss this vital Committee. I also congratulate them and the House on setting up the Committee and on choosing an extremely good Chair, who I believe has the support of all parts of the House, and an excellent membership of people with a great deal of interest in, and experience and knowledge of, these matters.
	The matters that we are giving the Committee to discuss are of historic importance, because they will correct the imbalance that has been growing since the House gave up control of its own agenda and allowed the Executive to determine the business of the House in order to break the impasse on Irish reform. For the past 120 years, we have been on a sliding slope, and over the past few years we have been mere ciphers. In my 26 years as a Member of this House, we have effectively been a rubber stamp for the Executive, and we must now assert our own distinct identity.
	This is a matter not of attacking the Government, but of understanding that the role of the House is separate and distinct from that of the Government. The Government are elected to introduce a programme of legislation and to recommend taxation, and it is our job to scrutinise them-but it is our job to do so in our time, and in our way, and not at the behest of the Government.
	That is why it is important not only that we set up this Committee to look at the business of the House, but that the Committee understands the definition of the business of the House, which includes everything for which the Government do not have a mandate, especially the nature and method of scrutiny. That is why the House must not only elect Select Committees but be in control of scrutiny. It is our job to scrutinise the Executive, not the Executive's job to tell us who should be on Committees, when they should sit or when there should be a vote.
	We have allowed the Executive to dominate this House increasingly for the last 100 years. At last-thanks to this Government, thanks to the Committee chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and thanks, I am confident, to the work that it is going to do-we will have an opportunity to correct that imbalance and have a proper relationship between this House, which is scrutinising the Government, and the Government, who are getting on with the work of the Executive. The two should be in proper tension. I am confident that with the business Committee and the election of Select Committees and their Chairs, we will make enormous strides towards getting a proper relationship between this House and the Executive. If we do that, we will be doing something of enormous historic importance. I hope that the Committee will be set up and will report. I am confident that it will and that it will do an extremely important job.

Bernard Jenkin: I believe that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) is unnecessarily modest about his own role in bringing the House of Commons to this point. He is chairman of a cross-party group: we call ourselves Parliament First, and we have been agitating for Parliament to have a greater role and a greater say in its own affairs. We have a list of aspirations-demands would put it too strongly-to put Parliament back at the centre of our national life. The hon. Gentleman has played a welcome role in that. His warm words for the Government in bringing us to this point are all part of the consensual atmosphere that we need to generate around this proposal.
	It struck me as odd that while we were attempting to set up a Committee to strengthen the House's control of its business and its Select Committee, the Government imagined that that could be achieved without debating the motion. It is, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) said, an irony that underlines the gulf between those in government or who aspire to government and the rest of this House.
	There was a failure of imagination among those on the Treasury Bench. They thought that simply accepting the amendments and including them in the motion would obviate the need for debate, but that was to underestimate what this House thinks of itself, and, indeed, what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) thinks of himself. I think that he was unfairly criticised in  The Guardian leading article today. His behaviour was not bizarre; it was principled. He insisted that if we were to strengthen the House, we should do it by the proper procedure and on the basis of debate.

Mark Harper: One thing that our hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) has achieved is to provide an opportunity for a large number of members of the Committee, including its Chairman, to listen and gauge the feeling of the House, which will inform the way in which they conduct the Committee. If for no other reason than that, it was surely worth having a debate in this Chamber.

Bernard Jenkin: My hon. Friend is entirely right about that point.
	The importance of this moment is that it grows out of the crisis that we have all endured as a result of the publication of our expenses and allowances. That issue did not just excite public anger; it was a lightning conductor for the fury felt by many people-not just about how politics has been conducted in this country in the past 10 or 15 years, but, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central said, about a trend reflecting, particularly in the post-war era, the ever-increasing ascendancy of party over the individual judgment of Members of Parliament.
	What is the House of Commons, or Parliament, for? Surely we exist for three fundamental purposes: to check the abuse of power by the Executive; to ensure that legislation is properly scrutinised and is fit for purpose; and to ensure that taxpayers' money is spent wisely and efficiently. In all honesty, has the House been doing a good job over the past 10, 20 or 30 years? Actually, we have been doing less and less of that job. More and more legislation goes through without being debated. Fewer and fewer Supply debates are about Supply and scrutiny of the Executive's expenditure. It has become harder and harder to check the power of the Executive, as more power has been handed over to agencies, quangos, the courts, Brussels or the European Court of Human Rights. Whatever part of the House one comes from, one can choose one's list of organisations to which power is handed over, which destroys the accountability and authority of the House.
	I put it to those on the Treasury Bench, and to anyone who aspires to sit there, that there is a fundamental truth about our democracy: the weaker that Parliament becomes, the weaker the Governments who derive from Parliament become. It is an irony that respect for politics and politicians has declined as the power of the House of Commons has declined. I do not dismiss the difficulty of exercising representative democracy in a world in which 1.5 billion people are on the internet and expect their say over every issue, in what we now call the network world. The world is very different from that conceived by, say, the 1832 reformers, or by Edmund Burke, who coined the immortal phrases about representative democracy and Members exercising their judgment on behalf of their constituents in the national interest, rather than being their delegates.
	Ultimately, the more complicated government and politics become, the more inevitable it is that those who devote their lives to politics and to service in Parliament will have to exercise their judgment on behalf of the 99 per cent. of the population who are far too busy leading a normal life to worry about the things that we worry about.

John Hayes: Is not the deeper irony that as the process described by my hon. Friend has occurred-Parliament has become more emasculated-expectations of both Government and individual MPs have grown? Does not that deep irony lie at the heart of this debate, and of the wider debate that has taken place over the past few weeks and months?

Bernard Jenkin: My hon. Friend makes an extremely apposite point, and I do not hold an instant answer to the problem he raises. The demands on individual Members of Parliament are less and less to conduct ourselves as national politicians in this Chamber, and more and more to act as super-ombudsmen and super-councillors-as representatives of our national Parliament in our constituencies, as opposed to representatives of our constituents' interests in Parliament. That is the context in which the Committee will have to conduct its investigations and inquiries and make its recommendations.
	As result of the crisis that has occurred, we have all been humiliated-I have certainly felt humiliated. That has served as a reminder of the real purpose of each of our existences in the House. It has been telling to see exposed how ineffective we have become at performing our real task, which is to check the abuse of power, to check the legislation, and to check the expenditure of the Executive.
	I feel that there is now a drive-a determination-in the House to put matters right. I do not want to raise expectations beyond what might be delivered by the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), but I believe that, of all the reactions to the expenses and allowances crisis, this is the most significant. It may be a small first step, but it is the most significant; and the most significant step that the Committee might recommend is one that would enable us to regain control over our own business.
	For most of the period since the debate about Irish rule, the only constraint on Government business has been the power of delay. Even during the 1970s and 1980s, when the guillotine began to fall more and more often on Government business in order to expedite its progress, delay was still the weapon. When, as shadow Secretary of State for Transport, I conducted the Bill that became the Transport Act 2000 through its Standing Committee, it was decided that we should delay the Bill for as long as possible on a particular point because we were so concerned about it. That kind of attrition is no longer available to the House. What is termed modernisation-and I think that even the most ardent advocates of modernisation would recognise that it has become a loaded term when connected with parliamentary reform-has come to mean emasculation. It has meant the withdrawal of that final sanction.
	It is interesting to note that the former Leader of the House, now the Secretary of State for Justice, said during debate on the Parliamentary Standards Bill that he believed that Parliament had become more effective in recent years. He holds that belief because the number of Divisions that the Government have lost has begun to increase, despite the enormous majority that the Government have enjoyed in recent years.

Lynne Jones: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Bernard Jenkin: I will in a second.
	I submit that the reason the Government are now losing Divisions is that the weapon of delay is no longer available. Whereas concessions used to be extracted through delay, the only way to force concessions now is by defeating the Government in the Division Lobbies. That may be a healthy development and a healthy response, but I do not think that it necessarily demonstrates that the House is working more effectively than it used to. The fact that so much legislation now passes through the House without debate and has to be scrutinised at length in the other place-and even the other place has a difficult job, given the present volume of legislation-leaves a serious gap in the armoury enabling our Parliament to hold the Government to account.

Lynne Jones: The hon. Gentleman has partly answered the question that I was going to ask. He has said that delay means that the Government may give way and concessions may be extracted. I do not want to return to that scenario; I should like Members to engage fully in the debate about legislation, and then vote according to the strength of the arguments. How can we ensure that, rather than returning to an old situation, we move forward to a situation of that kind?

Bernard Jenkin: The hon. Lady has led me precisely to my next point. The task of the business Committee will not be to return us to the war of attrition represented by the ludicrous all-night sittings of Committees and the whole House, although I believe that we lose something by our determination not to engage in such action. Here we are sitting at 10.55 on a Monday night, and I see no difficulty with our sitting late on occasion when there is pressure on the timetable and no other way of conducting our business.
	It strikes me as extremely frustrating when stacks of Members want to speak in a debate and the Government limit it to five hours and will not lift the 10 o'clock rule to allow more Members to speak-and indeed more Members to speak at length. There may be an advantage in limiting speeches to 12, 10, eight or six minutes in one respect, but I believe that it destroys the real purpose of this Chamber, which is to debate the issues and to allow every Member to speak and to take part in those debates.

Nicholas Winterton: Is my hon. Friend aware that, when the Modernisation Committee initially put forward its proposals for programme motions, it was intended that the programme motion should be discussed at least between the usual channels before it was taken immediately after the Second Reading Division and without debate. The decency of having some consultation before the programme motion was put down was withdrawn by the Government.

Bernard Jenkin: It is interesting that my hon. Friend should remind the House of that. It shows that efforts have been made to do programming in an intelligent way. I was an Opposition spokesman on the two devolution Bills at the beginning of this Government's term of office. Our great fear was that there was going to be an arbitrary guillotine that cut off debate on vast swathes of the Bill that we wanted to discuss.
	We proposed to the Government that there should be timetabling of the devolution Bills. It was quite controversial at the time. Many of my colleagues in the House were quite cross that we should co-operate in that way, but we calculated where the knives should fall during the Committee stage to ensure that the really important bits of the Bill were discussed and debated at least in some form. I am bound to say that my experience of that was not entirely satisfactory. Often, a new amendment would be moved. The former Father of the House, that great opponent of devolution on the Labour Benches, Tam Dalyell, would start a debate on a new group on an aspect that none of us had thought of and the motion would be closed off instantaneously.
	The purpose of a business Committee is to manage the business on behalf of the House and that includes managing the Government business. That was an important concession to extract from the Government. Its purpose is not to prevent the Government from obtaining their business, least of all their manifesto commitments, but to ensure that the House as a whole, including Back Benchers and the minority parties, have their say on Government proposals. Its purpose is also, if necessary, to provide the extra time by lifting the 10 o'clock rule and proposing changes to the business of the House-

John Hayes: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Bernard Jenkin: I must press on, unless my hon. Friend thinks that it is an urgent matter.
	For that reason, the business Committee must be composed of Back Benchers. There is a great temptation for the Government to insist that the Committee should deal only with non-Government business, that it will only deal with Government business because non-Government business impacts on Government business and that there must be a Whips majority from the Government on the Committee to ensure that the Government's business is obtained. That misses the point and misunderstands the spirit in which the hon. Member for Cannock Chase and his Committee will want to set up the Committee. It should not have a Government majority. It should be like a Select Committee. Perhaps it should be like the Committee chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, which does not have a Government majority, to ensure that it does not become another means by which the Government control the business.
	The Committee needs to discuss a lot of other matters. Why is it that only the Government can propose a business motion? Surely if we are going to control the business, either the business Committee or any Back Bencher should be able to put down a business motion. If there is sufficient support, it should be called for debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) said, why should the Government have a monopoly on proposing changes to the Standing Orders? If the business Committee is going to obtain control of the business of the House, it should surely be able to make proposals on Standing Orders. Indeed any Back Bencher should be able to put down a motion to change the Standing Orders.
	There are some positive proposals on Select Committees. Anybody could provide a shopping list of things that need to be done. I think the Select Committees need to consider taking more business under oath. If we want our Select Committees to be respected, why do we treat our witnesses so casually? Why do we not ask them to swear in before they give evidence so that they respect Parliament and there is respect for what is said? In particular, those who serve in Government but are not Ministers should realise that they are answerable to this House and not to the people who provide them with the line to take.
	I support the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). It is quite a simple matter to bring Members of the other place to the Bar of this House, or, indeed, to the Dispatch Box, to account for themselves. The advantage of allowing more Ministers to sit in the other place-of allowing more GOATs, or more representatives of the Government of all the talents-is that we may finish up with fewer Members of this House on the Government payroll. I reminded the House a short while ago that before the second world war there were perhaps as few as 50 Members of this House on the payroll. Today, there are more than 140. If we want this House to be more independent, perhaps we should look at how many Members of it are on the Government payroll.
	Just as with the Kelly inquiry, we should generally be minded to accept whatever proposals arise from the Cannock commission-if I may call it that. I realise that that puts a heavy responsibility on that Select Committee, but I believe the Government should appoint this Committee in good faith and we should do our best to make sure its proposals are implemented-and there should certainly be no whipping of either Back Benchers or Front Benchers on votes on those proposals.

Graham Allen: There have been a number of occasions in the past few weeks when some of us have actually seen a glimmer of what it might be like to be in a proper House of Commons. There were the debates on the Parliamentary Standards Authority. Anyone who sat through, or has read the record of, those debates would know that there were high-quality contributions from throughout the House that will stand the test of time. There have also been debates on the matter we are discussing now: the creation of a Select Committee to look at the reform of Parliament. We have had some unusual procedural niceties and some strange, quirky, individual additions to the democratic process, but there has also been an honest and open debate between colleagues-parliamentarians first, rather than members of the Government or the alternative Government. The quality has been there for people to see: it has been a glimpse of what the House could be.
	The election a few weeks ago of the new Speaker was another such occasion. Regardless of which horse we had our money on, there was a sense of the House taking a decision, and of individuals not being whipped or being pushed in a particular direction. There was a sense of excitement about that decision being made. That should be our prerogative every single working day in this Parliament if, indeed, we are to be a Parliament worthy of the name-and, boy, we need to become that institution.
	Reform is needed now more than ever. I see in the Chamber many of the old lags who have pursued the reform agenda along with me, but we are now joined by Prime Ministers and leaders of political parties, and the only reason why members or putative members of the Executive are queuing up to talk the talk about parliamentary reform is that Parliament itself has been exposed for what it really is in recent weeks. That is a result of the revelations about allowances and such like. In themselves, they have not destroyed Parliament's reputation, but they have uncovered in the British people a contempt for Parliament because we are not relevant. What we are doing tonight by, I hope, allowing the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) to chair this Committee is allowing Parliament to take the first few faltering steps towards becoming relevant once again.
	If we become relevant, people outside will forgive many things-they will not forgive everything-about this House. They will understand that we have a job to do and that we are not just here to claim the cash. They will say, They are holding the Government to account and scrutinising law effectively, as they are meant to do. Throughout my 20-odd years in the House, try as I might I, like other colleagues in the House, have never been able satisfactorily to carry out those functions in the House of Commons. It is about time that we did so.
	What we must do to establish those capabilities in the public mind is get the mechanics of how this House works right. We need to do two key things in that regard, both of which are addressed in the Government's motion. I congratulate them on tabling it, even though they did not do so because they wanted debate. They did not put the motion forward for debate, but they wanted the work to start, and they deserve credit for having put it that way. The only people who have held up the work starting are those who have found procedural niceties to get in the way. I am sorry, but that is the truth of the matter.
	Let us not forget that people were elected to be members of the Select Committee, not Whips' narks, safe pairs of hands or people who have been lobotomised. They were elected by their own colleagues-that was certainly the case in the parliamentary Labour party and in the Conservative parliamentary party-and had their names put forward on behalf of their colleagues. Those who have wished to slow the process down are not so much acting on principle as flying in the face of their colleagues, who elected colleagues for the first time to a Select Committee. I say for the first time, because it is an important principle that colleagues can be elected to a Select Committee.

Mark Harper: rose-

Graham Allen: I shall return to that point once I have taken the hon. Gentleman's intervention.

Mark Harper: I cannot let that point pass. The work that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) did in objecting has achieved significant changes to this motion. The original motion talked only of non-Government business and did not allow the Committee the power to look at the election of the Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means. The Government accepted that only-

Barbara Keeley: indicated dissent.

Mark Harper: We all know this, so I do not know why the Minister is insisting otherwise. If all the Labour MPs who signed my hon. Friend's amendment had voted for it, they would have defeated the Government. That is the only reason why they accepted it-the Minister knows that and we know that. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is gallantly preparing some great covering fire for her, but she knows that it is not true.

Graham Allen: My objective is not to defeat a Government of any political persuasion; it is to allow Parliament to exercise its rightful duties. That is why I want the Committee to be established, as we hope it will be at the end of the evening. The two main foundations that need to be put in place can be regarded as boring or technical, but they are fundamental-Governments know that, which is why they will fight hard unless it is put over in a very sensible and sophisticated way that change needs to take place.
	The first foundation is the election of Select Committees. As I have mentioned, colleagues in this House have, without civilisation as we know it or the Government falling, managed to elect their own colleagues to a Select Committee. One tiny link in a very strong chain may just be breaking as a result of that precedent. In addition, very recently we have all been allowed to elect our own Speaker in this House, which again established a precedent. Why on earth can we not be treated as mature individuals who can elect our own Select Committees and who have the sense, as individual Members of the House, to make a decision about whom we regard with respect and who we feel could do a good job for us without the Government and the alternative Government making our minds up for us? It is up to us to seize that opportunity and to exercise that right. Unless we do that, we will continue to play the game in which the Government dictate every movement in this House, instead of individual Members of Parliament.

Christopher Chope: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has the opportunity to participate in this debate. Does he have any insight into whether the Government will accept the result of the Committee's work when it reports? Surely that is the fundamental issue.

Graham Allen: I would have thought that the Government will accept the recommendations of the Committee only if, first, its work is focused on its terms of reference and, secondly, it accepts that one of the fundamental tenets of this place is that the Government need to get their business. We need to consider the balance between Government business and non-governmental business. If we are silly enough to fail to make proper provision for Government of any colour to get their business, the Government will always command a majority and will blow out the recommendations of the Committee. Our responsibility is to reform the House-and, in so doing, to push the envelope as far as is humanly possible-but also to accept the practical and political realities of this place. Without a written constitution, if we challenge the Executive, they have the majority to overturn any recommendations, whether in November or December.

Bernard Jenkin: On the question of the election of Select Committees, does the hon. Gentleman think that paid members of the Executive should be able to vote in those elections?

Graham Allen: I do not, but I am willing to listen to arguments from the Government and other colleagues on the Committee about whether that is a practical way forward. There are problems at the moment in getting sufficient people to serve on Select Committees. It may be that one of the answers is to have smaller Select Committees, but I hope that the Committee will have a chance to look at that point.

John Hayes: The nub of the issue is how the Government exercise their power. The hon. Gentleman is right that the Government have not only a right, but a responsibility to get their business, but the exercise of power can be restrained by the prevailing political culture. Historically, that was a culture based on a modest, measured and moderate exercise of government, and respect for both sides of the House-and the Opposition in particular. That is the difference-the change in political culture.

Graham Allen: What was accepted 100 years ago by gentlemen's agreement now needs to be enforced and put into writing so that we all know the rules. Clearly the Government must get their business, and that is their right, but Parliament must have its scrutiny and accountability, and that is its duty. We need to ensure a balance between the two. Both should be strong, capable partners producing better law and better accountability, as well as better value for money for the electorate. Working together as partners is something that the Government need to do, and a refreshed and re-energised Parliament would also need to play its part. Even in the best of times, it cannot be a partner if it says, This is our view and we're going to have our way, come what may. The Government have done that for far too long and Parliament would be foolish to do that itself.

Barbara Keeley: May I clarify two points that have emerged again during my hon. Friend's contribution? Two different motions were proposed and the change to accept the amendment on scheduling business rather than just non-Government business was made first. The objection that held up the establishment of the Committee was not made at that stage but later, so my hon. Friend is right: the objections that have been made night after night have held up the work of establishing the Committee-[Hon. Members: No.] Yes, they have. Motions were proposed on two occasions and this is the second set of amendments. Secondly, my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House made the point that she will be happy to schedule a debate to consider the Committee's report.

Graham Allen: There has certainly been a lot of game playing, which we are often reduced to in this place. We are in the play pen. Often, we are not exercising proper scrutiny and accountability so we find ways to entertain ourselves. However, this is a serious moment when some reform could take place. Many of us thought such a moment would never come, but because of other events we are now in a position where some reform can take place and I very much hope that the House seizes that opportunity. In doing so, we must look at a second group of issues in the terms of reference relating to the business Committee. I shall say a few words about that and then sit down.

Graham Stuart: rose-

Graham Allen: But first I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Graham Stuart: As the hon. Gentleman is to serve on the Committee, I encourage him to be as bold as possible. Does he believe that if a business Committee of the House had an entrenched Opposition majority, the Government would still be comfortable that they could get their business through?

Graham Allen: rose-

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am sorry to delay the hon. Gentleman, but I have a sense that the House is getting ahead of itself and is debating matters that may, or may not, emerge from the Committee, if the Committee is set up by a decision of the House tonight. The only issue before the House tonight is whether to set up the Committee, not to start anticipating what the Committee may say. That debate will come in due time, so I counsel the House that we cannot go on having a debate about what may happen. The question that we have to decide tonight is whether or not the Committee is set up.

Graham Allen: Indeed, Mr. Deputy Speaker. We all have a shopping list of personal parliamentary reform favourites-I have at least 10 on the Order Paper most days, as do a large number of colleagues. There is a need for discipline, given that we need to report in November on a strict timetable. That is why focusing on the election by secret ballot of Select Committees is very important. So too-finally-is the creation of a business Committee, which is something I and a number of colleagues will press in the Select Committee.
	It is nonsense that the House cannot influence its own agenda-that every day the Order Paper is full of stuff from the Government that the House is meant to scrutinise and hold to account. That is an affront. It renders Parliament powerless, which is why when we have a problem-as we have in the past couple of months-we are seen as pathetic in the face of what the Government bring to the party. The Government do not only control our agenda; they can introduce a Parliamentary Standards Authority that could even abolish the right to speak freely and openly in the Chamber. Such unmitigated, unmediated power is the fundamental corruption of this place. It is not financial corruption, but political corruption, where our institution of freely elected individuals is controlled by Government. That balance has to change and it can change only if there is a business Committee that works closely with the Government but is not in the pocket or the pay of Government.
	It is important that we create the Select Committee. It is important that we allow it to do its business. It is important that we have the discipline to focus on some of the key issues and that we move as swiftly as possible to a vote, if that is necessary, so that we have a Committee that can get on with the job of reforming the House of Commons.

Nicholas Winterton: I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), although I do not take precisely the same position on the way in which the Government have operated in introducing the motion.
	Can I please get from the Deputy Leader of the House a specific answer as to the question-initially asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young)-why the Government did not consider referring this matter to the Procedure Committee and/or the Modernisation Committee? Both are respected Committees of this House and would have been able to do the job that we are talking about very adequately. I take my right hon. Friend's advice that the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) could have been appointed as the Chairman of the Modernisation Committee. As the longest-serving Conservative member of the Committee I have to say that I would have been honoured and privileged to serve under the hon. Gentleman's chairmanship. I hope that I speak with some authority on this matter, having chaired the Procedure Committee for two Parliaments, as well as having been on the Modernisation Committee since it was set up early in the Blair Government, in 1997.

Barbara Keeley: The answer to the hon. Gentleman's questions lies in what he is saying: those Committees will continue. This is a time-limited Committee to look at a specific set of reforms that we hope can bear fruit in the next Session, which is a very different thing.

Nicholas Winterton: We hope that that is the case. However, one can always be a little suspicious-I mean no disrespect to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase-when a Committee is established by the Government and the Chairman is automatically put forward by the Government. I hope that I am not in any way breaching the guidance that you gave the Chamber a few minutes ago, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Peter Bone: Are not the Government to be congratulated on getting so many people here and making no attempt to restrict the time for the debate, so that all Members will get a chance to speak?

Nicholas Winterton: The Deputy Speaker has given some guidance, and I shall certainly endeavour to keep to that, although I believe that the criteria for the Committee-its mission as spelt out on the Order Paper-should be subject to some comment in this debate.
	I am very pleased that the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) took on board my intervention, in which I said that the House could take control of its business only if the House itself, or a Committee of the House, ideally under a Back-Bench Chairman, could draw up and table Standing Orders that governed how the House proceeds and how legislation is dealt with. Without that, all the wonderful euphemistic statements about what we hope to achieve cannot have results.
	I say to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase that I hope that he will be a very aggressive Chairman. I hope that he will be-I say this with some difficulty-a radical Chairman, or could I say a traditional progressive Chairman, so that the right decisions will be taken.
	That leads me to my second question to the Deputy Leader of the House. I think that she may have gone some way to allaying my concern, which is that all the recommendations of the Committee, when it reports to the House on or after 13 November, should be put to the House to be decided on a genuinely free vote. I say that with the Patronage Secretary looking at me with a friendly smile.
	This has been said by a number of speakers already, but this House now has a unique opportunity to restore some integrity and independence to the Back Benches and to the Floor of the House, so that Members can again carry the confidence of their constituents.
	Let me express another concern. I was delighted with the speech that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) made. He leads the Parliament First group with great intellectual rigour and distinction, and he has done a great service to the House. I should, however, express my sorrow, and that of other Opposition Members, that he was not nominated as a member of the Committee, because he could bring great wisdom to it. I suppose that I should declare an interest, in that I am sorry that I was not included either, but perhaps I am in some ways a little too controversial. However, I have, with a combination of my heart and my head, the interests of this Chamber very much at the core of what I want done in the House before I leave in 10 or 11 months' time. If, with the other Back Benchers of the House, I can help to restore the integrity that the House needs to do its job properly, in order to deal with matters such as programming, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) raised, we will have done a service.
	The amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) is certainly worth serious consideration. I would not go quite as far as my hon. Friend in saying that I would support the hon. Gentleman if he pushed it to a vote, but it would do a great deal for the reputation of this House if important Ministers who lead critical Departments but who sit in the House of Lords were brought here to deal with important statements at the Dispatch Box in this Chamber. I do not believe that that would be an over-revolutionary idea. It deserves serious consideration, and I hope that the hon. Member for Cannock Chase will give it that consideration, whether or not the hon. Member for Thurrock presses his amendment to a vote.
	Let us take this opportunity to do good to the House of Commons. It has gone through a difficult period. Many people feel very unhappy about the way in which the House and individual Members have been treated. Let us restore to the House the authority that will enable it to stand up, not only for its own interests, but against the too often overweening power of the Executive.

Nick Brown: claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
	 The House divided: Ayes 218, Noes 41.

Question accordingly agreed to.

Mark Harper: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Given that the title of the motion is Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, how can the fact that the Government allowed only an hour and a half for debate and the Chairman of the Committee voted in favour of the closure give Back Benchers any confidence? Is that not an abuse of the House, and does not it negate what we have just voted on?

Philip Davies: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. In your opinion, is it not wrong that the person who was responsible for the debate in the first place-my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope)-was unable to make a speech, when people who had been against such a debate-

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Member must not question the decisions of the Chair about who is called to speak in the debate. Responsibility for terminating the debate lay with the Chair on accepting the closure motion. The Chair does not have to explain decisions, but some might think that it was fairly obvious why it was reasonable to conclude the debate at that point.

Question put accordingly , That the amendment be made.
	 The House divided: Ayes 52, Noes 202.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Main Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	(1) That a Select Committee be appointed to consider and make recommendations on the following matters:
	(a) the appointment of members and chairmen of select committees,
	(b) the appointment of the Chairman and Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means;
	(c) scheduling business in the House;
	(d) enabling the public to initiate debates and proceedings in the House; and
	(e) such other matters as appear to the Committee to be closely connected with the matters set out above, and to report on these matters by 13 November 2009;
	(2) That the Committee also consider such other matters as may be referred to it from time to time;
	(3) That the Committee consist of eighteen Members;
	(4) That Mr Graham Allen, Mr Clive Betts, Mr Graham Brady, Mr David Clelland, Mr David Drew, Natascha Engel, Dr Evan Harris, David Howarth, Mr Michael Jack, Mr Greg Knight, Mr Elfyn Llwyd, Mr Chris Mullin, Dr Nick Palmer, Martin Salter, Dr Phyllis Starkey, Mr Andrew Tyrie, Dr Tony Wright and Sir George Young be members of the Committee;
	(5) That Dr Tony Wright be Chairman of the Committee;
	(6) That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House; to adjourn from place to place, to report from time to time and to appoint specialist advisers;
	(7) That this Order be a Standing Order of the House until the end of the present Parliament.

Business without Debate

SITTINGS OF THE HOUSE

Motion made,
	That, at the sitting on Tuesday 21 July, the Speaker shall not adjourn the House until any message from the Lords has been received, any Committee to draw up Reasons which has been appointed at that sitting has reported, and he has notified the Royal Assent to Acts agreed upon by both Houses.- (Mr. McAvoy.)

Hon. Members: Object.

REGIONAL SELECT COMMITTEE (WEST MIDLANDS)

Motion made,
	That Dr. Richard Taylor be a member of the West Midlands Regional Select Committee. - (Mr. McAvoy.)

Hon. Members: Object.

REGIONAL SELECT COMMITTEE (YORKSHIRE AND THE HUMBER)

Motion made,
	That Mary Creagh be discharged from the Yorkshire and the Humber Regional Select Committee and Mr. Austin Mitchell be added. - (Mr. McAvoy.)

Hon. Members: Object.

REGIONAL SELECT COMMITTEE (SOUTH WEST)

Motion made,
	That Linda Gilroy be discharged from the South West Regional Select Committee and Roger Berry be added. - (Mr. McAvoy.)

Hon. Members: Object.

HUMAN RIGHTS (JOINT COMMITTEE)

Motion made,
	That Mr. John Austin be discharged from the Joint Committee on Human Rights and Fiona Mactaggart be added. - (Mr. McAvoy , on behalf of the Committee of Selection. )

Hon. Members: Object.

PETITIONS

Travel Passes (Lancashire)

Rosie Cooper: Despite West Lancashire borough council being a net gainer in the Government's concessionary transport scheme, older people and the disabled in my constituency are forced to choose between free bus travel and a discounted rail card, while their neighbours in Liverpool and Manchester have free bus and rail travel. To that end, I bring a petition to the House of Commons from the residents of West Lancashire and others. It states:
	The Petition of residents of West Lancashire, and others,
	Declares that the current arrangements of West Lancashire District Council force disabled people and those over sixty years of age to choose between a national off-peak bus pass and a discounted rail card; further declares that asking people to make a choice between these two items is not acceptable; and believes that local passholders should get a better deal, like their neighbours in Wigan and Southport.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Secretary of State for Transport to do all in his power to ensure that West Lancashire District Council changes its arrangements so that disabled people and those of sixty years of age are entitled to both a national off-peak bus pass and a discounted national rail card.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000399]

Public Transport (Lancashire)

Janet Anderson: Rossendale Transport is the local authority-owned bus company that serves the Rossendale valley in my constituency and many of the surrounding areas. The local authority, Rossendale borough council, is now considering whether to sell off the company. This has met widespread opposition in the local area, and particularly in my constituency, from all those who rely on the services of Rossendale Transport. I am therefore pleased to have this opportunity to present the petition of the customers of Rossendale Transport in my constituency. It states:
	The Petition of the customers of Rossendale Transport,
	Declares that the announcement by Rossendale Borough Council, that they plan to test the market to ascertain the interest in Rossendale Transport Ltd with a view to a possible sale of the company, is against the wishes of the thousands of people who have signed this Petition; notes that Rossendale Transport is one of the few local authority-owned bus companies which makes a profit; believes that if such a sale were to proceed, it could seriously jeopardise public transport services in the Rossendale Valley which are essential to those without access to a car, particularly the young and the elderly; and further declares that up to 200 jobs could be put at risk.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to take any necessary action to prevent Rossendale Borough Council from selling off Rossendale Transport.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000398]

SWINE FLU

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. -(Mrs. Hodgson.)

Christopher Fraser: I am pleased to have secured this debate on what is an extremely pressing issue-even at this late hour. I have been trying to secure a debate for some weeks in order to raise concerns about our preparedness for swine flu. I had hoped to secure a more general debate so that colleagues could also contribute. I believe that the Government should have arranged for a debate in their own time, as these are very important issues, so it is pity that they were unable to do so.
	Despite today's statement, there are still some issues that I would like to put to the Minister, reflecting comments made to me since the Secretary of State's update. We are experiencing the first global flu pandemic for 40 years. I commend front-line NHS staff and others in the health care sector. The UK death toll currently stands at 29, but the number is increasing. Each death has been a tragedy for friends and family, so I am sure that the Minister will join me in sending condolences to them all at what is an extremely difficult time.
	I did not call this debate to whip up public anxiety or panic. All I want to do is try to get reassurance on a number of key issues, not least because of the extra pressures and costs placed on the NHS and the predicted drop in economic output as factories, offices and businesses cope with a reduced work force. The public, I believe, have a right to be as well informed as possible and I fear that conflicting advice and information from various sources have become a big problem.
	The Secretary of State clarified advice for expectant mothers this afternoon, which was welcome. However, confusion still remains in other areas. To what extent are the Government liaising with the medical profession, charities and the media to ensure a consistent message?
	Despite the fact that the UK initially adopted a containment strategy, it has the fifth highest number of cases of swine flu in the world. Does the Minister accept that this is because our containment strategy was not as effective as it could have been? Many of those who should have been given antiviral drugs-because they were infected or had come into close contact with someone who was infected-did not receive this treatment.
	At the start of July, the number of confirmed cases of swine flu exceeded the number of doses of antivirals administered by more than 1,000. Does the Minister agree that if a proper containment strategy had been in place, the number of people receiving antivirals would have been far higher? Why were those with suspected swine flu not targeted alongside those confirmed with the illness? The Government also indicated that they would contain the virus by giving antiviral drugs to those who had been in contact with a swine flu victim. Yet figures from the start of this month show that antivirals had been given out to fewer than two confirmed contacts of each victim. Can the Minister explain how this demonstrates a rigorous containment strategy?
	The Minister might argue that this strategy could have been pursued only for a limited period of time, and it is now necessary to move towards a strategy of treatment, as the Government have done, but the World Health Organisation in a briefing note published only seven days ago states that all countries should, as part of their pandemic vaccination strategy,
	reduce transmission of the pandemic virus within communities.
	Does the Minister believe the Government are heeding that advice?
	I want to move on to discuss the concept of a national pandemic flu line. The Secretary of State said today that a flu line has become necessary only very recently. In their A national framework for responding to an influenza pandemic, the Government said a flu line should be ready when the World Health Organisation raised its alert to level 5:
	During Phase 5, response plans must be ready for instant implementation and activated when required... the national flu line will be established.
	When the WHO raised its alert to level 5 at the end of April, the then Health Secretary stated that a flu line would not be up and running until October. Will the Minister explain why the Government decided to ignore their own national framework? Does she accept that that has hampered the health care sector's ability to distribute antiviral drugs and information efficiently?
	We are now told that a national pandemic flu service will be established by the end of this week. The service will include a website and call centres, but will only be an interim service. When will a full service be rolled out and how will it be different? The Secretary of State confirmed today that all Members would be given details about antiviral collection points in their constituencies this week. Will the Minister answer the question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) about whether maximum distances to collection points will be agreed? That is hugely important in rural constituencies such as South-West Norfolk, and other constituencies across the country where vast distances must be travelled to attend hospital or a clinic, or even to visit a doctor. Will the Minister reassure me that the distribution strategy will not put unnecessary pressure on hard-pressed pharmaceutical wholesalers?
	I also want to mention criticisms from health care professionals. GPs have made it clear that delays to the flu line have resulted in those with symptoms turning up at their local surgery instead of remaining at home, thus going against public health advice. They also say that the pressure put on surgeries by the worried well results in patients with serious health conditions finding it difficult to get appointments. Does the Minister recognise those extra pressures on local GPs' surgeries and community health centres?
	A company specialising in respiratory medicines has also highlighted the likelihood of swine flu aggravating underlying health conditions, such as asthma. What contingency plans are in place to take account of increased demands for medical devices such as inhalers? What extra resources are being made available to NHS staff, who might face increased demands from patients suffering from other existing health conditions?
	The Royal College of General Practitioners has accused the Government of giving conflicting advice to doctors and patients. GPs say that there has been a lot of confusion over prescribing Tamiflu, and there is a lack of clarity about how long a patient should be advised to remain at home after contracting the virus. Does the Minister agree that it is vital that the Government and the health care sector share a common approach?
	On the vaccination programme, the Secretary of State suggested today that we could begin receiving supplies from August, yet the WHO has said that a fully licensed vaccine might not be available until the end of the year. Will the Minister confirm that the first doses of vaccine will have been fully tested? It is vital that we start a debate about what criteria will be applied for prioritising certain vulnerable groups for early vaccination. That debate needs to start now, in a sensitive and considered manner, well before vaccination is made available, so that the public are clear about who will receive initial doses. How will decisions on priority groups be reached? Who will be consulted, and does the Minister accept that time might be running out for such consideration?
	I now turn to forward planning. Sadly, experts agree that we have not seen the worst of swine flu. More people are expected to become infected. The death toll, alas, is expected to rise, and we should not underestimate the threat of a more virulent strain developing as the virus possibly mutates. The onset of autumn and winter will bring conditions that are far more conducive to the spread of the virus. Some experts have suggested that we should have sent more people to Mexico or the United States earlier, to gain vital information about the virulence and impact of swine flu. Does the Minister accept that point? Will we be sending people to, for example, Australia-which is in the midst of its flu season-to gain a better understanding of the way the virus may affect the United Kingdom during our winter?
	There are other countries with lower death rates than the UK from which we can learn. In the context of the global nature of swine flu, I understand that some airlines have called for GPs to certify people swine flu-free before they fly. The British Medical Association is anxious for GPs not to have to bear any further burden, and to be able to spend time treating people rather than form filling. Can the Minister confirm that the latter will not become a requirement for them?
	The chief medical officer for England has issued figures relating to a worst-case scenario, which suggest that if 30 per cent. of the population contracted swine flu it could lead to some 65,000 deaths. He has stressed that those figures relate to a worst-case scenario, but even the Health Secretary's figure of 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August are cause for much concern throughout the House and our constituencies, and hence throughout the country. That number of cases could lead to around 1,500 hospitalisations a day, yet the Society of Critical Care Medicine says that the UK has the lowest number of critical care beds per 100,000 people in western Europe and north America. Although the matter was raised today by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire, he received no specific answers to his queries. What is being done to offset the potential pressures? What criteria are the Government applying to the cancellation of elective operations? Will hospital trusts be allowed to make their own decisions on the basis of local conditions?
	I am aware that biocides have been developed to kill the swine flu virus through hand gels, sprays, diffusers and wipes, and that many other countries across the world are using those products in their fight to contain the pandemic. I understand that some can be effective for up to a fortnight on treated surfaces, and that a hand gel will still be effective after two hours. Organisations could be required to use biocides. To combat MRSA we have all been required on occasion to use handwashes and wipes when visiting hospitals, and when there is an outbreak of foot and mouth disease we are required to put our boots and vehicles through anti-bacterial washes. What consideration has been given to the establishment of a campaign for public awareness of such products, or to ensuring that they are used in public areas such as schools and the transport network? In his advice to expectant mothers this afternoon, the Secretary of State cited good hand hygiene first. In the light of that, does the Minister accept the points that I have made about the wider use of licensed biocides?
	We are in uncertain territory. The Home Secretary has said that the threat from swine flu could be worse than that from terrorism in terms of its impact on communities. As I emphasised at the start of my speech, I do not intend to cause undue panic, but the Government must be clearer about their plans. Delays to vital measures such as the national flu line have only served to reinforce the view that they may be under-prepared. People's lives depend on a robust and carefully thought-out strategy to deal with this pandemic, and I hope that the Minister can give me the assurances that my constituents and the public demand.
	I know the Minister well, and I know that she will respond to me in good faith. If there are points that I have made tonight to which she cannot respond in the limited time available, I ask her-in good faith-to respond to them in writing before the House adjourns for the summer recess tomorrow. If she will do that, I shall at least be able to pass her responses to colleagues so that they can return to their constituencies in the knowledge that the Government have addressed these serious issues.

Gillian Merron: I congratulate the hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Christopher Fraser) on securing the debate on what is an important matter. I certainly undertake to answer any questions that I am unable to answer in the limited time I have available. I will endeavour to do as much as possible before the House rises. I am sure that he will understand that it might be difficult to meet his request, but I will get the answers to him as quickly as possible.
	I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the need to reassure the general public. They are understandably concerned as cases of swine flu increase. I hope that he therefore welcomes the statement made today by the Secretary of State for Health, which dealt with a large number of the issues about which we have just heard. While recent weeks have seen a considerable acceleration in the rate of spread, it is important that I take the opportunity to stress that the basic nature of the virus has not changed. Swine flu has not become more dangerous. To give some perspective-I know that the hon. Gentleman agrees with me about the need to give perspective-as with seasonal flu, it remains a mild and self-limiting illness for the overwhelming majority of people, although it can be severe in a few cases. Of course, I again offer my condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones.
	The basic hygiene advice to people is exactly the same today as it was some months ago, and it is worth reiterating. To help to limit the spread, people should sneeze into a tissue. They should dispose of it properly and wash their hands. To reduce the chances of catching the virus, people should wash their hands regularly. If they have flu-like symptoms, they should stay at home, check their symptoms on www.nhs.uk, or through the swine flu information line and then ring their doctor if necessary.
	Soap and water is good enough, we believe. A leaflet has gone out to every household and information is available on the website. In areas where there has been a particular concentration of cases, extra and considerable efforts have been made in terms of communications. To answer the hon. Gentleman, hand gels are useful where it is not possible to get to a place to use soap and water but over and above that we regard that as a matter for individuals and not something that we are promoting.
	I turn to the issue of NHS preparedness. Our health service has been preparing for a pandemic for many years, and the World Health Organisation has said that this country's preparations are among the best in the world. I summarise by saying that we prepare for the worst and we hope for the best. Our early efforts to contain swine flu by isolating cases, offering Tamiflu as a preventive method and shutting schools where necessary gave us a precious window of time to learn more about the virus, about which little was known, and to fine tune our preparations.
	We stockpiled antivirals, so that we have enough to treat half the population, and will be increasing that to cover 80 per cent. in due course. We ordered more than 15 million additional courses of antibiotics to treat complications and they will be delivered over the coming months, as will the 226 million extra face masks and 34 million extra respirators that we have ordered to protect health and social care staff. We took major strides towards developing a vaccine, about which I will seek to give some reassurance.
	The House will already know that the Department of Health has signed contracts with manufacturers to supply enough vaccine for the whole population. According to their delivery schedules, we should begin receiving supplies from August, with enough becoming available for at least 30 million people by the end of the year. Clearly we want the vaccine to be available as soon as possible but we cannot compromise on safety. I assure the House that we will take all necessary steps to ensure that the vaccine is appropriately tested.
	It is interesting to note that, in preparing for a pandemic, appropriate trials to assess safety and the immune responses have been carried out on vaccines very similar to the swine flu vaccine. Those vaccines have been shown to have a good safety profile. Over 40,000 doses of the said vaccines, on which the swine flu vaccines are based, have been given without any safety concerns. There is no suggestion that the UK would use a vaccine without careful consideration of safety issues. We have one of the most successful immunisation programmes in the world and we intend to keep it that way. We are now planning the vaccination programme so we can start administering vaccines to priority groups including NHS and social care staff as soon as we get the green light to proceed, and we will continue to take the best independent scientific advice on all vaccination questions.
	The hon. Gentleman asked how the decision on who gets the vaccine first will be made. As I have said, administering the vaccines will need to be prioritised, and we will make a decision when we know more about the risk profile. A decision on prioritisation of groups of the population will be taken on the basis of which groups are being most affected by the virus, when the vaccine arrives, and how best to protect the capacity of the national health service. Therefore, there are a range of factors to be taken into account.

Christopher Fraser: I am very grateful to the Minister for her clear answers to my questions. When decisions on prioritisation are taken, will local considerations be taken into account, so that the practitioners on the ground locally will have the final say?

Gillian Merron: We have to ensure consistency across the country, so we will act on the best medical and scientific evidence that we have got.
	The Secretary of State outlined earlier how we would keep colleagues in the House informed on these matters during the recess, and I shall come on to that now. The Secretary of State confirmed earlier that, following our request, strategic health authorities will provide weekly briefings for MPs coinciding with the Health Protection Agency's national updates. They will cover the kinds of information that the hon. Gentleman requested, which are important to all Members as constituency MPs. The information will include the numbers of diagnosed and confirmed cases and of hospitalisations, updates on antiviral collection points, and local information on any clusters or other specific developments. There will also be a hotline number to the local SHA so that Members have a direct line to express any concerns, make any inquiries and establish what the position is locally. Local arrangements will vary across the country-the hon. Gentleman talked about his constituency being particularly rural-so this local contact is extremely important. I can also assure the House that the civil contingencies committee will meet weekly during the summer months and Ministers and officials will be in close contact and in dialogue with their counterparts in the devolved Administrations to ensure a consistent UK-wide approach.
	The hon. Gentleman raised the important issue of the national pandemic flu service. We have always been clear that it would be virtually impossible to limit the spread of swine flu indefinitely, and in recent weeks it has become apparent that it is no longer effective to continue intensive efforts simply to contain the virus. As a result, we switched our emphasis to treating the increasing numbers getting the virus. I also wish to echo the comments of the hon. Gentleman and of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State earlier by thanking all health workers both on the front line and behind the scenes who have been dealing with the increasing numbers of people with swine flu.
	The national health service is coping extremely well and we should pay tribute to its ability to respond to times such as this. As the number of cases continues to grow, we will need to give extra support, so the national pandemic flu service will be instrumental in taking the strain off doctors' surgeries. When we took the decision to move from containment to treatment, we were clear that the service should be brought into play as soon as it was needed on the ground, so I should stress once again that the technology to launch the flu service has now been available for some time. We have been anticipating and waiting for the point when we saw a significant spread across many areas of the country before it became worth while and sensible to launch the service nationally.
	What we have seen in recent days is exactly that eventuality, for which we have been planning and working. A significant acceleration in the spread has taken place, with 55,000 new cases of swine flu reported last week and an equivalent increase in pressure on front-line services. To give an illustration, on 8 July just six primary care trusts reported exceptional levels of flu-like illness, whereas one week later, on 15 July, the figure had increased to 110. It was at that point that the Secretary of State took the decision to activate the national pandemic flu service-the decision was based on demand, not on the availability of technology. This means that the service will go live in England by the end of this week, subject to testing, and will be accompanied by a major public information campaign.
	After the launch, people will no longer need to ring their general practitioner if they suspect they have swine flu. Instead, they will be able either to answer questions online via the new website or ring the call centre service, where trained staff will be able to assess them over the phone. If swine flu is confirmed, they will then get an authorisation number, which their flu friend can use to pick up antivirals from local antiviral collection points. As I said earlier, hon. and right hon. Members will receive information on the location and number of collection points as part of a weekly update through their strategic health authority.

Christopher Fraser: Does the Minister accept that many people who feel vulnerable will naturally and instinctively wish to go to see their GP, rather than go online or make a telephone call? With respect, those services have historically not been as successful as they have been set out to be in the past. Added pressure will be put on GPs because people will instinctively still call them first.

Gillian Merron: That tendency is understood, which is why it is so important that this service has been fully tested and will work. It is important to remember that GPs themselves are asking for this, as are the SHAs and the PCTs; everyone across the NHS is saying, This will help us. I know that the hon. Gentleman knows that if someone has the virus they should not go to their doctor's surgery, because they should be staying at home-I am sure that he promotes that approach in his constituency, as I do in mine. That is a very important, but I certainly agree about the need to reassure and give full communication.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the differences between the interim and the full service. An enhanced national pandemic flu service, based on the original flu line design, is still planned to be available by October. The key differences between the interim and the enhanced service are the following: the enhanced service will have increased functionality to provide greater verification of patients' identity against the database; it will have an automated interactive voice response function, in addition to call centre handlers; it will allow authorised health care professionals to authorise an antiviral to a patient directly, without completing the full IT assessment process; and it will have an enhanced clinical algorithm, which will include separate pathways-separate ways forward-for adults and for children, with greater flexibility to alter the assessment process.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about international work, and I can confirm that the Health Protection Agency and the Department of Health are in regular contact with colleagues around the world and with international organisations, such as the World Health Organisation, to ensure that we learn all the necessary lessons about how countries are responding to the pandemic and, indeed, to pass on our own good practice and share.
	Containment did not fail-
	 House adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 9(7)) .